Clamorous fake-speakeasy joints have been all the rage since Graydon Carter and his friends opened their semi-private West Village dining club, the Waverly Inn, on the corner of Waverly and Bank two years ago. Pricey, lavishly sourced gourmet hamburgers have been proliferating on menus around town for much longer than that. But as in any other fashion-obsessed industry, trends in the restaurant world don’t officially become part of the mainstream Zeitgeist until certain tastemakers come along and put their stamp on them. Enter Keith McNally, the man who made distant neighborhoods like Tribeca (the Odeon), Soho (Balthazar), and the meatpacking district (Pastis) safe for the dining masses, and unleashed upon the city a plague of a million ersatz brasseries, which continues to this day. Like all ambitious businessmen, McNally misfires now and then, but he has a genius for gathering disparate notions and designs from the collective ether, distilling them down to their essences, then reconstituting them for his loyal public, in a professional, popular, often palatable way.
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