I have arranged to meet Jay McInerney at Balthazar, Keith McNally’s New York homage to the Parisian brasserie. When I arrive I spot the novelist, elegantly dressed in a crisp chambray shirt with a striped scarf tied loosely around his neck, sitting in a booth that commands an excellent view of a room already raucous with lunchtime chatter.
“I always have one of these three booths,” he says, gesturing to the tables next to us. As if to confirm his status as a valued regular, a waitress appears shortly afterwards with two glasses of what she says is champagne — on the house. McInerney takes a small sip. “I think it’s prosecco,” he whispers conspiratorially. “Not a bad prosecco. But it’s prosecco.”
McNally is a friend of his. “When I was a young man I used to go to the Odeon,” he says, referring to the celebrated restaurant the British-born McNally opened in neighbouring Tribeca in 1980. “I didn’t usually go there to eat because I didn’t have a lot of money. I would sit at the bar and watch the Saturday Night Live people, and the artists, Basquiat and Warhol, and the models and all that.” The Odeon is still going, though the scene there is decidedly less louche than it was in its heyday.