George McNally.
Photo: Krista Schlueter/The Sunday Times Style Magazine/News Licensing
There are many different ways to interpret the name of the upcoming Tribeca restaurant, Faux. It could refer to the essential restaurant skill of creating a make-believe space that evokes the romance of, say, Paris. It might be a play on its homonym, foe, a nod to the struggle between generations, the old order challenging the new; or the struggle between restaurant workers and demanding customers. But, as Faux’s owner, George McNally, says, it’s mostly a matter of typographic aesthetics. “I like different things with Xs and Vs. Especially things with the different letters that appear in Roman numerals.” A few beats later, perhaps unintentionally, McNally also lets slip that there might be a deeper meaning: “Opening a restaurant for the first time, I feel like I have imposter syndrome.”
Though the project will be McNally’s formal introduction into the New York restaurant world, he is not unknown to New Yorkers. He appears, like the rest of his family, in his father Keith’s 2025 memoir, I Regret Almost Everything. (It was a then-13-year-old George who found his unconscious father after a suicide attempt. “I was so anxious about it coming out,” the younger McNally says, “because I knew it was pretty personal.”) And Keith has been, he says, offering insights to him in every restaurant they’ve ever entered: “He’s always got something like whispers about the lighting or the sound.” Since moving to New York from London in 2022, McNally has also been bartending on-and-off at his father’s flagship, Balthazar. “Now I’m doing like one or two shifts every few weeks,” he says. In conversation, he is uncommonly shy (“I tend to mumble,” he mumbles), but behind the bar he comes alive. “I just like the stage,” he says. “I like entertaining people.” It is also behind the bar that he’s learned to keep any ego in check: “You can’t ever think that you’re the fucking best,” he says. “You’re not a genius or anything. Shake drinks. Do it well. Learn the history of it and know the ground rules.”
McNally won’t be behind the bar at Faux, but he is behind everything else. He is young, of course, and there is some sort of unstudied innocence about him. His tattoos read sweet things, like “be good” on his left hand. On top of the usual struggles of opening a restaurant in New York — and at an age when most people are getting entry-level jobs — George must wrestle with doing so while stepping out from his father’s significant shadow. “I have something to prove,” he says, “I want to be like, ‘I can do it.’” (Whether his father would have even been amenable to a partnership will remain an open question.) He’s spent the last year raising $1.5 million from investors (“I thought it would be asking four people for $500,000 each,” he says, “but it’s, like, constantly bothering people”) and has been working hand-in-glove with Ian McPheely, who has also designed Pastis and Balthazar, on details like moldings and light fixtures. “They’re based on the ones from Lucky Strike,” McNally says, “which was always one of my favorites of my dad’s places.”
The menu — filled with straight-ahead crowd-pleasers — provides additional shades of his dad’s places. The prompt is Mediterranean. McNally’s chef, Kristina Ramos, has done stints at Auberge la Fenière outside of Marseille as well as the Minetta Tavern in D.C. “I didn’t want to make a fussy, fancy menu,” she says. There is a burger with a riff on sauce algérienne (basically spiced ketchup and mayo), steak-frites, pan-seared halibut, and mussels in sauce meant to evoke bouillabaisse. It’s the work of either a trepidatious first-timer or a seasoned restaurateur who knows the real magic is in the alchemy, in the dance between customers, in the accumulation of a genius loci who elevate the air. It’s ineffable and, to some extent, unplannable. “Really good service, really good food, but much more social, much more atmosphere and cozy,” McNally says, ticking off the elements that are most important for Faux. “By no means pretentious — it’s not going to be white-tablecloth.”
He’s aiming to open this summer, but as of early June, the space is still a sea of drywall and uninstalled HVAC ducts leaning against uninstalled mirrors. On this day, McNally is eagerly awaiting the delivery of some tiles, and he doesn’t seem nervous. “It’s all fabricated already — they just need to install it,” he says. “You have to be comfortable with it looking like a total mess. I mean, there’s a stage where it quickly comes together.” Is that advice gleaned from his dad? Not exactly, according to McNally. “My father is very hands off with everything. He’s not really one to be like, ‘Let me help you.’”
