Keith McNally on Balthazar’s First-Ever Fashion Collaboration

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New York Fashion Week was in full swing on Monday night at Balthazar. The best tables in the house (toward the back, with primo views of the dining room in its nicotine-glowing glory) were filled with celebs like Aubrey Plaza and Tessa Thompson, who held court alongside magazine editors and the odd influencer. Nothing out of the ordinary for Keith McNally’s beloved French bistro in SoHo, really—New York’s culturati have been drawn to its zinc bar and bistro tables for cold martinis and dependable steak frites for nearly 30 years. As is customary when McNally’s friends are in the house, glasses of gratis champagne were flying out from the bar.

Nobody has ever needed an occasion for a hedonistic Balthazar dinner party at 9 p.m. on a Monday night, but this crowd happened to have one: the recently-announced partnership between Balthazar and Ami Paris. Orchestrated by Ami founder and designer Alexandre Mattiussi, the month-long collab includes a takeover of the dining room, where Ami logos appear on the hostess stand and on special placemats, while Balthazar Bakery slings baguettes in custom-branded Ami paper sleeves. The dinner invite came in a co-branded tote bag with a croissant and a Balthazar x Ami Paris ballcap.

Matt Bomer, Alexandre Mattiussi, and Tessa Thompson at the Ami Paris x Balthazar dinner.

Courtesy of Ami Paris

Restaurants love merch, and fashion loves a restaurant collab. Among many examples: In 2022, Burberry stretched a plaid awning above downtown art-world boîte Lucien, and Hailey Bieber’s favorite LA haunt Sushi Park recently opened an outpost in the basement of a Saint Laurent store in Paris. Many other luxury brands have simply opened restaurants of their own.

But the news that McNally was working with the French purveyors of chic “real Parisian” style took some Balth regulars by surprise, namely because the project represents a first for the iconoclastic British restaurateur (who rose to social media fame in part for publicly 86’ing James Corden back in 2022). Said Derek Blasberg on Substack, “Keith McNally doesn’t strike me as a traditional partnership kind of guy, which only made it more intriguing.” Added Emily Sundberg in Feed Me: “I just didn’t think I’d get an ad for anything besides Keith McNally’s book at Balthazar.”

At the dinner, between double-kisses with guests, Mattiusi agreed that Balthazar was one of the great restaurants in the world. “And the food! It’s incredible,” said the Parisian designer. “I already had lunch here today.” McNally wasn’t in the house for one of his infamous DJ sessions, but he answered some questions by email about how the Ami takeover came to be. He also confirmed what many had suspected, which is that—Ami collab notwithstanding—he “hates restaurant merchandise.” As McNally wrote, “Balthazar does sell baseball hats and next door at Balthazar Bakery we sell T-shirts. But we don’t display them, thank God.”

Keith McNally: Partly because we’re neighbors. The Ami store is only three blocks away. And partly because when my management team met the Ami team last month, they returned gushing about how nice and low-key the Ami team were. I tend to like people who are understated and low-key quite a lot. I also like Ami’s brand.

Absolutely terrible man. No, of course not! I haven’t met Alexandre Mattiussi. I’m quite a shy person. Ask my staff. Seventy percent of the time when I dine at my restaurants, I dine alone. I actually like my own company. (Which is fortunate because no one else does.)

Nothing frightens me except rejection. I don’t know why, but I like seeing the Ami brand in Balthazar’s dining room a lot. I really like their logo.

In the last year, I’ve come round to preferring the sound of the restaurant “din” to the sound of music. Apart from weekend nights, when I DJ from 11 p.m. until 1 a.m., the level of the music is very, very low. This would have been unthinkable four years ago.

Balthazar is already so busy at lunch and dinner seven days a week that an increase in business is impossible right now.

It always depends on the person, not the profession. Always.

I like to think the reason why Parisians seem to particularly like Balthazar is because it reminds them how restaurants in Paris used to be, but I’m probably wrong. I usually am about most things.

You must be joking!

Great question: 36 and counting.