I Had No Chef, No Toilets and No Budget. But I Was Determined to Open Balthazar.

When I bought the space that would become my star-studded French brasserie, I had a specific vision that would take miracles to execute.

Keith McNally at his restaurant Balthazar.

By Keith McNally | Photography by Jonah Rosenberg for WSJ. Magazine

May 5, 2025 7:00 am ET

The idea for Balthazar came about while I was living in Paris seven years before I built the place. I was searching for vintage curtains at a flea market in 1990 when I suddenly spotted an old sepia photo of a turn-of-the-century bar. Behind the bar’s zinc counter were hundreds of liquor bottles stacked 20 feet high, flanked by two towering statues of semi-naked women carved in the classical Greek style. I was so mesmerized by this image that I forgot about the curtains and bought the photo instead. For years I carried it in my back pocket, thinking that if I ever found a space with a sky-high ceiling, I’d build a bar just like the magnificent one in the photo. Stepping into Adar Tannery in the summer of 1995, I’d found that space. Five months later construction began.

Before I begin building, I always have a specific idea of a restaurant’s design. But as the boxer Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” My watertight floor plan usually starts leaking on the first day of construction. Unable to visualize an idea until it becomes tangible, I will often build things two or three times over until I feel it’s right. The artist Robert Motherwell said he painted “by correction.” I do everything by correction, especially restaurant design. That’s why I always go over budget. And why I’d never invest in myself.

‘Never rush the guest,’ Keith McNally wrote in the restaurant’s first waiters’ manual. ‘Good service is based on anticipation.’

Before construction began, the dining room had five enormous windows. For most restaurateurs, windows are sacrosanct, but at Balthazar, the first thing I did was block in two of the windows and replace them with mirrors. Like plays and films, restaurants work best when they create their own universe. To be reminded of the outside world while dining is like hearing the doorbell ring while making love.

During the first week of renovations, my co-designer, Ian McPheely, and I spent ages figuring out where the gigantic bar should go. (Assuming we could build it, that is.) It took us three days to agree on the location, but once we’d worked it out, the rest of the design fell quickly into place. Ian and I never used architects’ plans when putting Balthazar together. As ideas came, we scribbled crude drawings on whatever bits of paper were within reach. But the formidable semi-naked female statues—called caryatids—were another matter. Google had yet to be invented, and I hadn’t a clue where to find 6-foot statues of scantily clad women. They weren’t exactly being sold at Pottery Barn. Eventually, Ian suggested that a classically trained sculptor friend, Brandt Junceau, should carve them. After working out a price, Junceau’s only question was a pleasantly awkward one: Did I know a woman with a voluptuous body and firm breasts like those in the photo who’d be willing to model for him? (Classically trained sculptors have all the fun.)

What I did next would be impossible today, in these politically correct times. I asked two of the waitresses from my restaurant Pravda if they’d like to pose topless for the sculptor. They not only jumped at the chance, they also refused the money I offered, and in the weeks that followed, both spent several hours modeling in the sculptor’s studio. The faces, bodies and breasts of the statues ended up being a mix of the two waitresses. Which parts are from whom, only the women and the classically trained sculptor know.

Like plays and films, restaurants work best when they create their own universe.

Since school, I’ve felt inferior to men who use their hands to make a living—primarily cooks and carpenters. I’m a mediocre cook and a hopeless carpenter, and yet when I build a restaurant I’m supposed to give direction to these very people—people whose jobs I could never do in a million years. I have such a feeling of inferiority to my cooks that I do everything imaginable to avoid going into the kitchen. Since Balthazar opened in 1997, I’m reluctant to admit that I’ve entered its kitchen during service fewer than 20 times. But every time I do, I come out feeling 3 inches shorter.

A month before construction on Balthazar began, I drove around France looking for restaurant furniture. In a remote salvage yard in Burgundy, I found six 19th-century train compartment luggage racks, each one aged naturally over the past 140 years. They were sensational and would fit perfectly above Balthazar’s banquettes. Even though they were expensive, I splashed out and bought them. I paid in cash and asked the owner of the yard to store them while I headed south in search of bistro chairs. I’d pick them up in five days, I told him.

Between the flea markets of Béziers and Montpellier, I found all the chairs I needed and made my way back to Burgundy. As I arrived at the salvage yard, the owner told me he’d improved the luggage racks for no extra charge. I followed him inside a small wooden hut, and there on a long table were my six 19th-century luggage racks. Only they were no longer 19th century. They were 21st century. The owner had scraped, scoured and scrubbed 140 years of beautiful oxidation off them. I was distraught. “I’ve had a long day,” I told him. “Let me find a hotel and I’ll return in the morning.”

I didn’t return in the morning. I didn’t return at all. I drove all the way back to Paris without stopping. On the drive north I thought about all the things we can’t untie. Relationships I’d messed up and people I’d let down. It’s strange how a relatively trivial turn of events can set off a landslide of self-doubt. How a well-intentioned act from someone you don’t know can symbolize everything you loathe and detest in life. Particularly in yourself.

Two months before Balthazar opened, I began hiring the numerous floor staff necessary to service this 180-seat restaurant for lunch and dinner seven days a week: one general manager, an assistant general manager, eight floor managers, 35 servers, eight food runners, 10 bartenders, four barbacks, 25 busboys, four baristas, four maître d’s and 12 hosts. Ten days before opening, I began training the servers. Every restaurant has its own waiters’ manual. Here’s Balthazar’s original one, which I wrote a week before we opened in April 1997:

When describing the menu, never say “I have.” Always “we have.” Saying “I have” is affected, and an insult to the cook who made the dish.
Be friendly, not chummy. Always repeat the customer’s order back to him. “Skate” sounds like “steak” after one martini.
When waiting on someone famous, direct most of your conversation to the other people at the table, especially the spouse or partner of the famous person. Spouses of famous people rarely receive attention in public. It’ll make their day.
Never rush the guest. Good service is based on anticipation. Where possible, try to anticipate the customer’s needs. This does not mean hovering over the table. As a customer, I can’t bear to sense a server or busser lurking a few feet away.
Please don’t clear the customer’s coffee cup until after he or she leaves or drop the check before he or she asks for it.
When reciting the day’s specials, always mention the price. When a customer pays the check in cash, never assume the change is your tip. Always return the change to the table!
Never offer a celebrity a free drink. Instead, offer it to a regular, or the guest least expecting it. And once the meal’s served, never utter the phrase “How is everything?” It’s meaningless. If you must break the flow of our customers’ conversation, please let it be a simple “Do you need anything?”
Always replace dirty ashtrays.
Lastly, never, ever go home with a customer...for less than $500.

Keith McNally with chefs Riad Nasr (left) and Lee Hanson (right) at Balthazar. Photo: Courtney Winston

Most of these service rules still hold true. Except in today’s climate, I could never get away with the last line—clearly a joke—without risking a lawsuit.

Six weeks before Balthazar was scheduled to open, I still hadn’t found a chef, but a friend mentioned Riad Nasr, a sous-chef at Daniel, a four-star restaurant uptown. It was rumored that Daniel’s owner, the acclaimed chef Daniel Boulud, considered Nasr to be the best cook he’d ever worked with.

We met in Starbucks, across the road from Balthazar. With his poker face, unshaven beard and slicked-back hair, Nasr resembled more a samurai warrior than a four-star sous-chef. I thought he seemed suspicious of me, but I always feel this about people I admire. Nasr agreed to prepare a tasting for me the following week.

His food was stunning, and the next day I called and offered him the job. He accepted but on one condition: that I also hire his working partner, Lee Hanson. I hesitated. If I hired his friend, I’d be paying two chefs’ salaries instead of one. With Nasr sticking to his guns, I had no choice but to agree to hire his partner. It turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made.

The chefs and I got along surprisingly well. I admired them and they tolerated me—until I suggested adding hamburgers to the menu. Both chefs disagreed. Coming from a prestigious uptown restaurant that in those days frowned upon serving burgers, Nasr and Hanson were reluctant to put them on the menu. I wasn’t pushing for hamburgers because I particularly like them or because of their relatively high profit margin. I wanted them on our menu because I didn’t like the snobbery involved in not having them. The chefs eventually changed their minds. After steak frites, hamburgers would become Balthazar’s bestselling dish.

Steak frites, Balthazar’s bestselling dish.

Three weeks before Balthazar opened, the dining room still resembled a building site. Plumbers were installing toilets in the customers’ bathrooms, electricians were running lines to the wall lights and a horde of painters were staining all the tables. Suddenly, a miracle occurred.

Onto this construction site wafted the most delicious smell of food being cooked. After 18 months of hard hats and steel beams, here was unmistakable proof that it was a restaurant we were building. For 10 seconds, everybody laid down their tools and smiled. (It was as if they’d heard the first cries of a baby’s birth in the next room.) Later that day, a cook came out of the kitchen carrying an order of steak frites. It was the first dish ever cooked at Balthazar.

Adapted from “I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir” by Keith McNally, to be published by Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC on May 6, 2025. Copyright © 2025 by Keith McNally. Printed by arrangement with Gallery Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

Appeared in the May 10, 2025, print edition as '‘I’d Never Invest in Myself’: Keith McNally on Building Balthazar'.