The Sunday Times (of London) has a longish profile on the young (22) George McNally — Keith’s son by his second wife — who has taken the former Shigure Sake Bar space on Church and White for what sounds like will be a brasserie not unlike his father’s hotspots (Pastis, Balthazar, Lucky Strike). It will be “French coastal” on the ground floor and a bar downstairs — which The Times said will be late-night, but CB1 has yet to opine on that. Shigure had the cocktail bar B Flat downstairs.

The story says renovations will begin this spring? (I thought there was already work going on there…) but it also says they open in May. As far as I know, they do not yet have a liquor license. Shigure closed in 2022 after 15 years in that spot. Maybe the license can be transferred even after four years?

Of course Keith’s first shot at restaurants was The Odeon, which was founded by Keith, his brother, and his then-wife Lynn Wagenknecht in 1980, and is still owned by Lynn. (She also has Cafe Cluny, which should be on your list for when you are north of Canal).

Young George, whom the Times calls “undeniably calamitous” for his reckless teenage years, plans to open sometime in May. This is what we learn:

• George was born here and lived in the Village until age 8, when the family moved to London
• He dropped out of British boarding school at 16 and started as a dishwasher at Elephant & Castle just off Kensington High Street
• He moved here in 2022 and started working for his father as a bartender at Balthazar
• He took the 277 Church space last July and is now finishing it off with castoffs from his father’s shuttered restaurants
• The chef is Kristina Ramos, who George met when she consulted on Keith’s opening of a new Pastis in Washington, DC in 2024. See is Filipino-American, raised here, and has worked at l’abeille along with other starred places
• Keith McNally is not an investor
• His father’s longtime designer, Ian McPheely, and architect, Richard Lewis, will design the space.
• The restaurant is as of now unnamed

The story also has a great shot from 1997 of Keith with his chefs Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson, who would go on to open Frenchette here in 2018, and then in 2020 take over Arcade Bakery.

This from The Times: “He doesn’t want to reveal the name yet — ‘It needs to be connected with the experience’ — and is unsure of how he’ll carry himself each night once it opens around May: ‘Some people pull off the whole schmoozing thing, but I’m not sure.’ At home he didn’t discuss the project with his father for many months. ‘By the way,’ Keith writes to me in an email, ‘though George and I are extremely close, I have nothing whatsoever to do with his restaurant. Especially financially. (I admire him so much more because of this.)’ McNally himself also wanted independence. ‘I don’t feel comfortable taking money firstly,’ he says. ‘And secondly I wanted to have done the whole process, to have learnt every aspect.'”