Dirt: Boomer posting

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Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, on restaurateur Keith McNally’s Instagram and the latest good links from the Dirtyverse.

The New York City restaurateur Keith McNally is famous for his restaurants, but it wasn’t until last October, after he went viral for rebuking comedian James Corden (“that tiny Cretin of a man”) for his abusive behavior towards Balthazar staff, that I realized McNally’s Instagram posts, perhaps more so than his businesses, are worth paying close attention to. McNally’s portfolio of New York restaurants include the aforementioned Balthazar, Pastis, Minetta Tavern, and Morandi.

I am, on principle, against dining at any three-dollar-sign restaurant that serves New American or French fare. I have only been to Balthazar once for a birthday dinner, and to paraphrase a line from Sex and the City: There are ten thousand restaurants in New York and I will not be at Pastis. Since McNally’s public castigation of Corden, however, I have devoted a [redacted] number of hours to scrolling through his Instagram feed, mentally cataloging his likes (Shakespeare, Philip Larkin, Elements of Style, Woody Allen), dislikes (surprises, the Tin Building sign at Seaport, the word “very”), and quirks with alarming enthusiasm. I can’t look away—not even from the recurring posts about his vasectomy or the tell-alls about his sex life (“I'd particularly like to have sex in the bathroom of a restaurant owned by Daniel Boulud or Danny Meyer.”)

Neither, for that matter, can culture writer Jason Diamond, who has proudly been on the Keith beat for far longer than I have. Diamond wrote a marvelous Dirt blog on the restaurateur's capricious Instagram posts, which “can go from chaotic good to chaotic evil in the blink of an eye.”

To me, there is a blissful levity to McNally’s tone that is familiar to anyone with Boomer-aged parents, particularly those who are zealous oversharers. They treat their social media captions as a public diary of sorts, full of paragraph-length digressions riddled with personal details. This style of Boomer posting rejects the self-conscious pandering that plagues the captions of most young social media users — and I’m deploying “young” quite generously here, as millennials and Gen X-ers are included in this assessment. New Yorker critic Hilton Als has perhaps the most polished and sophisticated Instagram presence out of the NYC Boomer microcelebrity circuit. Most of his captions are short and to the point (“Rachel Weisz, performer”), but Als does indulge in the occasional rant and digressive blurb.

McNally posts what he wants when he wants, not out of some imagined obligation to the algorithm, his followers, or the McNally brand. There’s a purity to his earnestness, even though he isn’t shy about courting controversy. (And why should he? Every day, thousands of New Yorkers will dine at his suite of world-famous restaurants.)

McNally’s Instagram exudes the unfiltered shamelessness of art critic Jerry Saltz’s Twitter: They double down on questionable opinions, eagerly engage with commentators, and even sometimes contradict their earlier posts. “In defense of changing my mind so publicly, I cling to the words of philosopher [and] essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson: ‘A Foolish Consistency is the Hobgoblin of Little Minds,’” McNally wrote in a recent caption. When online authenticity is just another metric in producing a coherent, ready-made brand, this kind of honesty is only afforded to Boomers, people who’ve spent most of their lives offline. They are immune from being perceived. They might be cringe, but at least they are free. —Terry Nguyen

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• A behind-the-scenes look at how Fictive Kin designed the Dirtyverse.

• A short profile of the artist Lorraine Louie, who designed the iconically stylish Vintage Contemporaries book covers of the 1980s. (New Yorker)

• Gossip Girl isn’t returning to HBO Max for a third season, per the show’s creator Joshua Safran.

• How the British pizza chain PizzaExpress reimagined restaurant design: “From its conception, PizzaExpress was a radical step for British restaurant culture; the food might not have been completely new, but the design of its outlets – from the furnishings and lighting to the art on the walls – had a profound impact on the way Britain’s restaurants looked and, by extension, who they catered to.” (Vittles)

• The soundtrack of this newsletter is composer Ryuichi Sakamoto’s latest album 12. Sakomoto once offered to create a dining playlist for his favorite restaurant in New York, the now-closed Kajitsu, because he couldn’t stand the background music that was playing: “a mixture of terrible Brazilian pop music, some old American folk music, and some jazz, like Miles Davis.” (NYT, h/t @blisscotheque on Twitter)