Just another quiet night out for Keith McNally

Keith McNally is anxious. He is fretting that Balthazar's ceiling is the wrong shade of smoky yellow. He is worried the strip lights aren't right and the hanging fans are definitely wrong. He is concerned about his chips, his tea strainers, his salads. But now he is mostly anxious about not being able to find his childhood home.

We start our search, appropriately it seems, in "barmy park" next to the tube, where the Bethnal Green Library was built on the site of a 200-year-old asylum. "I haven't been here for 50 years," he says. "I was terrified of this place. It was so austere. I was a local kid and they would make me wash my hands before letting me in. I was in terror of not bringing books back in time."

It is a decade since McNally was here, despite living in London for the last two years in an expensive, expansive Notting Hill house, light years and a lifetime away. "I haven't brought my wife or children here either,Like most of you, I'd seen the broken buy mosaic decorated pieces." he says. "I have reluctance … "

As we walk in the cold, winter rain he tells me about Joyce and Jack, his mum and dad. "They should never have married,Service Report a problem with a street light." he says. "My mother was neurotic, cautious. She always felt slighted. We were never allowed to bring anyone into the house or sit on the green sofa or go into a certain room. My father was a docker, more easygoing,The cost of cleaning just 2 infected lenses is already higher than the cost of a dry cabinet. a keen amateur boxer and footballer."

His parents parted in the late 80s, he says, as we pass by Joyce's final home: "She was unsettled in every way, always moving, always thinking the next home would make her happy.Which Air purifier is right for you? She was a deeply unhappy woman." But it was her ambition – and his fear – that drove him. "My mother read a lot, did well at school but wasn't allowed to stay on. I only did slightly well out of fear of ending up at Fairfields School, over there. They used to put your head down the toilet on your first day at Fairfields so I worked just hard enough to get to the grammar school."

We walk past the site of the old ABC bakery in search of a pie and mash shop. Like many exiles, McNally has a romantic longing for scraps of his childhood culture and history: he talks knowledgeably and happily about Wat Tyler's death at nearby Mile End and of the old market gardeners and silk weavers of Stepney. We stop a pair of passers-by and ask directions to the pub near to long-gone Palm Street where the McNally family home once stood. "If I can see the Palm Tree I will know where we were," he says.

We are close now but times, the landscape – and McNally – have changed. We cross a park with a failing "ecology pavilion" while he reels off the routes and numbers of local buses like a reassuring mantra. We are lost and cold and wet. Then suddenly he sees it – an old-school East End boozer, standing alone, shorn of the streets that once surrounded it, and it all comes flooding back. "Look, there it is," he says with relief. "My prefab where I lived would have been … right here. God, I broke one of the pub windows with a cricket ball. Palm Street …" We stop, he exhales, then is quiet. "It is a terrible feeling when the place where you grew up has vanished," he says finally.

McNally's life could be a mini-series: poverty, exile, money, fame, bitter family rivalries. A younger sister, Josephine, was born eight years after Keith and there are two older brothers: the eldest,Site describes services including Plastic Mould. Peter, is now a taxi driver living in Wanstead, and Brian – the Kinks' Dave Davies to Keith's Ray, as Vanity Fair once put it – with whom McNally opened his smash-hit Odeon while still in his 20s, and who was for a time a rival to his restaurant crown.

Much of what we understand about the glamour of New York restaurants was created by McNally. In a 30-year career, he has opened a stream of successful businesses – Odeon in TriBeCa, the nightclub Nell's, Pastis in the Meatpacking District, Minetta Tavern, Balthazar – that defined their times and the downtown areas they dominated. It hasn't always been easy. He has walked away more than once, to make films, to farm. At the height of Odeon's success, the McNally brothers fell out; something about Keith and their mum, some say, and didn't speak for five years. Now, though, they talk or write every day, perhaps because Brian is running a restaurant in Saigon, on the other side of the world.

David Bailey, the Stones. McNally is working as a bell boy at the Hilton on Park Lane when he gets a break: "Some American producers were making a film about Dickens with Michael Redgrave, and they couldn't cast a part," he says. "I was 16 but looked 12 and I got it. A limousine would pick me up from home and take me to filming. Later, I played The Winslow Boy in York and had a lead on TV, though my parents wouldn't watch it."

McNally's lifelong love affair with theatre and film had begun. He appeared in Alan Bennett's 40 Years On at the Apollo theatre in the West End for a year, though when he told Joyce he'd be on stage with John Gielgud, she "burst into tears: 'You're going to be working with a homosexual!'" It was with Bennett he ate his first restaurant meal: steak at Bianchi's in Soho, and the playwright was later an investor in the Odeon.

By 1971, McNally had followed the hippie trail, hitchhiking through India and Afghanistan. On returning home, he worked the lighting board at The Rocky Horror Show and moonlighted at the Nell Gwynne strip club in Soho, where his current backer Richard Caring's Dean Street Townhouse now stands. "I was the stage manager," he says. "I checked the girls in, checked they were dressed, undressed, and stood at the side of the stage, taking their clothes. I had a terrible fear of seeing someone I knew, maybe my dad." He was sacked when one night the tape machine sped up, forcing the women to strip too fast: "Even when you are fired from a job you don't care about it is devastating."

While working at Rocky Horror, McNally had made a "couple of short films, some bits and pieces", and arrived in New York in 1975 intending to become a director, but restaurants got in his way. For a while he was working as the ma?tre'd at One Fifth in Greenwich Village, where the Saturday Night Live team – John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd et al – had their aftershow parties. When McNally teamed with brother Brian and Lynn Wagenknecht, later his wife, to turn a tired TriBeCa cafeteria, the Towers, into the Odeon, the showbiz scene followed and the rest is restaurant legend. Warhol, De Niro, Scorsese, Cher, Mick Jagger, Liz Taylor, Warren Beatty were all regulars. Belushi helped himself to food in the walk-in fridge ("Leave him," was McNally's smart response) and once saddled and rode supermodel Janice Dickinson around the restaurant. Excess was everywhere – fistfights with artist Richard Serra and with the aggrieved owner of One Fifth; Jeff Koons and Jean-Michel Basquiat being kicked out. Cocaine was snorted from every rest-room surface, chronicled by another regular, writer Jay McInerney, in 1980s New York's definitive novel, Bright Lights, Big City. When Random House published the book their lawyers were worried McNally would sue over the talk of drugs – instead he approved the use of the Odeon's awning on the cover.

Next came Cafe Luxembourg, Nell's – New York's hippest nightclub – more restaurants, McNally's Midas touch turning everywhere into a goldmine. But, of course, he wasn't happy. "I got so depressed about being in New York not doing what I wanted," he sighs. "By the late 80s I had the Odeon, Cafe Luxembourg, Lucky Strike. I had Nell's where Rose Gray [later of London's River Café] cooked. But I didn't care.