When he tired of acting (he hates acting), he hit the hippie trail, hitchhiking and taking buses through India and Nepal. His shoulder-length hair and placid good looks — McNally still resembles both a Roman bust and an ’80s-era French leading man — did nothing to dampen his warm receptions. He arrived in New York in 1975, vaguely intending to make films, but he ended up, as most aspiring artists in this city do, working in restaurants.

He cut his teeth at One Fifth, now defunct, where he moved from oyster shucker to waiter to maître d’ to general manager. The restaurant was sophisticated, and it was a scene; McNally befriended Lorne Michaels, who’d bring the “Saturday Night Live” cast there. He met his first wife and future business partner, Lynn Wagenknecht, at One Fifth. He also befriended the young Anna Wintour, who changed his life by inviting him to Paris and touring him through that city’s best bistros and brasseries.

My favorite was a place called Chez Georges. I loved the smell of escargots drenched in butter and garlic, the look of the red banquettes, the scored mirrors, the handwritten menu, the waiters with their starched white, ankle-length aprons. Everything about the place stimulated me. Even the jug of pickled cornichons on the table.

He returned to New York determined to open his own version of a Parisian brasserie. He did so and more, redefining this city’s restaurant ethos as he moved along. Most were in gritty downtown neighborhoods. The Odeon, in Tribeca, opened in 1980. The then unknown Jay McInerney offered to pay McNally for the use of the restaurant’s signage, with the Twin Towers looming off to one side, on the cover of his novel “Bright Lights, Big City” (1984). McNally didn’t think the book would sell, so he let him use it for free.

Then came Café Luxembourg, on the Upper West Side, in 1983. The restaurant was named after the Polish-German intellectual and revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, but he misspelled her name. Then Nell’s, in 1986, “a nightclub for people who don’t like nightclubs.” Later came Balthazar, his Soho workhorse, which opened in 1997 and was almost named Brasserie Lafayette. Then the original Pastis in 1999.