I feel like—so not cool,” George McNally says. We’re at a Chase Bank in Tribeca. Not the part with cobblestone streets, $20 million lofts, and boutiques that sell $500 Japanese denim jeans. The part east of West Broadway that bleeds into the grit of the Financial District, the skyscrapers so tall and the streets so narrow that sunlight doesn’t reach much at all. We’re standing under fluorescent lights in a room that smells of Lysol, near a teller behind plexiglass. No one would describe this as “cool.”
The 23-year-old is hyperfocused on cool right now, because blocks away, he’s making a restaurant called Faux. Why Faux? “I don’t know,” he says, hitting his vape. “During the build-out, there’s a bunch of different elements in construction that are all like, faux this, faux that….”
Faux, McNally’s soon-to-open restaurant, will feature a dining room serving South of France inspired cuisine as well as a downstairs lounge for later-night lingerers.
He has a vision: an all-day restaurant serving food that’s South of France–ish, like the kind you’d get on a perfect day in Saint-Tropez but not pretentious or too expensive. And it stays open late. “It’s impossible to get food anywhere after 11, midnight,” he laments of the city that supposedly doesn’t sleep. Downstairs he’s building a lounge where guests can linger. Right now the vision is still under construction. Which is why we are at the bank. To make something cool involves an uncool process of zoning permits, building codes, and cash withdrawals. “I have to be so boring about stuff right now,” he says, stuffing a wad of bills into his wallet. Several black tattoos, including one of a cocktail glass, flex across his arms.
He may seem young to be opening a restaurant, yet most men his age are not a son of Keith McNally, the man who made Balthazar and Minetta Tavern, to name only two; they’re not a nephew of Brian McNally, Keith’s brother who did Indochine. The McNally family holds a deep lore in New York: Despite being English born and raised, they opened the very eateries that defined and inspired the city’s downtown culture. Jay McInerney waxed poetic about The Odeon in Bright Lights, Big City. In the 1990s, Sex and the City dedicated an episode to Samantha and Carrie trying to get into a thinly veiled Balthazar. Can George own the Gen Z night?
While a “child of” in acting or modeling would send nepo baby accusations flying, the margins of the restaurant business are too tenuous for anyone to seem to care. As Anthony Bourdain wrote in Kitchen Confidential: “Never having had a Friday or Saturday night off, always working holidays, being busiest when the rest of the world is just getting out of work, makes for a sometimes peculiar worldview.”
That worldview is the only one McNally has ever had, first as a child among the red leather booths of his father’s restaurants, then as a teenager working in a London pub. A stint in nearly every position in the back and front of house followed: busser, dishwasher, waiter, bartender. The elder McNally wasn’t sold when he saw the potential Faux space. George signed the lease anyway. He had no reservations.
