Located in Manhattan’s Soho, Balthazar is a Parisian-style brasserie with its own unique features.  Very much like its Parisian counterpart, the eatery is both a neighborhood hangout and place to enjoy a fine meal. Created by a British transplant, Keith McNally, who at the time was an illegal immigrant, but in 2017 the owner, staff and restaurant are legal and thriving.  Balthazar has been in business for twenty years. The decor, service, and most importantly the menu, all have French roots. In the great tradition of European brasseries and bars, regulars feel a strong sense of community, which was especially true after 9/l11 and Hurricane Sandy. 

Reggie Nadelson is a native New Yorker, who unreservedly loves her city, and feels the same about Balthazar. This book documents the restaurant and its staff, but is very much a love letter to a place Nadelson considers a second home. She was given full access to the building’s underground tunnels that link different prep areas, storage closets, administrative offices, and she does everyone proud by personalizing the restaurant: its regular customers, wait staff, chefs, cooks, support food staff, administrative team and owners.  The reader gets a clear view about what is involved in working and running a restaurant on a daily basis, year after year. Love and passion may be the ignition, but not the fuel that keeps things going almost 24/7. It takes dedication, interest, planning, tough business decisions, and hours of work (most of it physical) beyond that of any other type of work.  Anthony Bourdain, the modern bad boy of cooking, conceded that the knees are definitely a vulnerable point for early degradation caused by long hours of standing. In addition the required work schedules negate a normal life.

Keith McNally, a working-class Brit, brought Parisian comfort, ease and great food and drink to Soho. Balthazar is a restaurant where there is no sense of urgency or pressure for diners, all of which belies the goings-on downstairs in a rabbit warren covering a city block, where the majority of food prep and cooking take place. Beyond the menu, McNally also knew exactly what he wanted and how to get it, which is part of the exciting story of Balthazar's birth. Nadelson's candid view of a restaurant's real-life workings is also reminiscent of parts of Gabrielle Hamilton's memoir, Blood, bones & butter: the inadvertent education of a reluctant chef.

LAPL also owns The Balthazar cookbook, which has recipes for many of the restaurant's signature dishes.  The cookbook includes photographs, and a wonderful foreward by art critic Robert Hughes.

Check out this video of Reggie Nadelson at Balthazar: The Women at Balthazar.