Keith McNally - The scene stealer

Keith McNally's fantasy restaurant is not about the food, it's about a particular sensation he felt as a young man in Paris. He was sitting in a restaurant reading a book and for a moment he looked up to see a ravishing French woman. He turned back to his book then looked up a moment later and she was gone. So I'd go back to reading and I'd be thinking about that woman,' he mumbles in an East London accent which has resisted 35 years of living in New York.

As restaurant concepts go, it's hard to see this passing muster with investors. But McNally, 58, is not just any restaurateur. In a city where restaurants open and close with the speed of a camera shutter, McNally has successfully launched and run 11 of them, each, in its own way, somehow capturing this saucy essence. He is the Alex Ferguson of New York's restaurant scene, winning relentlessly in a brutal, ever-changing league.

From Odeon in TriBeCa to Balthazar in SoHo, Pastis in the Meatpacking District and now Pulino's on Bowery, a McNally restaurant guarantees a certain kind of New Yorky bliss. You turn off a gritty street into a room bathed in yellow light, where bottles and old mirrors line the walls, models squeak on red banquettes, the fries are hot, the martinis cold and the taxis flash by in the dark outside. The service may be haughty, the crowds too much and the food better elsewhere, but there's always a sense of excitement and possibility in a McNally restaurant. McNally, after all, is a restaurateur who prefers small to large tables because they offer a better chance of playing footsie with your neighbour.

The question for him now, though, is can he pull this off in London? His latest backer, Richard Caring, the man who bestrides London's fine dining scene with his numerous high-end restaurants and clubs, including Le Caprice, The Ivy, Soho House, Annabel's and Scott's, is eager for him to do so. Caring is dangling a remarkable carrot, the former Theatre Museum in Covent Garden, a property which he recently snatched from under the noses of Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, the owners of The Wolseley (although planning permission for the project was recently denied, Caring is confident that this will only be a temporary setback). The idea is that McNally will turn the space into a London outpost of Balthazar. It will be McNally's first restaurant in his home town, and the prospect is already causing much excitement among the capital's dining elite.

Caring initially approached McNally two years ago, when he offered him $100 million for his six New York restaurants: I first met Keith in the lobby of a hotel and asked him if his raincoat was originally Columbo's,' says Caring. McNally refused Caring's opening offer. Personally, I don't have much integrity,' he says. But I don't like transfers of restaurants. My restaurants have a lot of me in them. They're about the way I live. The people I hire are from Downtown or Brooklyn. Balthazar has a lot of downtown New York about it.'

After brushing off Caring, McNally stayed in touch and the two men bonded over a long walk in Devon: 8am till 7pm. Not much was said but as McNally put it you know you're comfortable with someone when you're not talking all the time'. The pair did, inevitably, go into business, and Caring became the main financial backer behind McNally's latest New York venture, the all-day pizzeria and bar Pulino's on Bowery and Houston. It bears all the McNally hallmarks – bottles ascending the walls, well-worn wooden tables – as if transplanted whole from some backstreet in Lyons.

It's not a radical change in what he refuses to call his formula', but as with seemingly everything he does, it has him jittery. Every time I open a restaurant, I feel like I'm going to be exposed,' he says, his voice soft, his eyes darting all over the room, his hands fiddling with the sleeve of his black sweater. I feel like I'm one level above a tic-tac man.' Caring, meanwhile, says he sees Pulino's as the springboard for taking McNally global. Keith is a success because of his absolute attention to detail and complete passion about what he does. His insecurities force him to outshine the opposition. I wanted to work with him because I am so impressed by each and every one of his restaurants I have been into – which is all of them. We will definitely open a restaurant in London together. But New York and London are world's apart; each city requires local knowledge. Restaurants of these ilk are extremely personal to their clientele. Having opened Le Caprice in New York we have experienced this to a huge degree.'

A good part of McNally's charm is that he openly sports the tensions of his life. Here he is a self-deprecating Eastender holding sway over one of the most socially aggressive groups of people in the world – New York restaurant-goers. His restaurants generate some $70 million a year and employ more than 1,100 people, while his father was a dockworker and cab driver, and his mother an office worker. He went to grammar school in Bethnal Green and says he found the British class system suffocating; yet now he operates private reservation lines for special customers he rates from AAA to A. Only 15 rate as AAA, including McNally's old friend Anna Wintour, the British editor of American Vogue. He excuses this as basic customer service, he says, rather than noxious elitism. We've got some very good customers and we want to make sure we treat them well.' He maintains that the customers he most wants are the ones who seem nervous about entering his restaurants. The ones who remind him of his own family, squinting at the menu, worrying if this is the place for them. He says he tells his managers to focus on the people waiting in line who seem most intimidated. The confident ones will get in. It's the ones who seem uncomfortable we want to come in and feel transported.'

He uses the word transported' frequently, as it applies so well to his own arrival in New York in 1975. He came to the city hoping to be a theatre director, after appearing as a schoolboy actor in the West End alongside the likes of Sir John Gielgud. Like so many thespian hopefuls, he ended up waiting tables, but unlike most, he developed a taste for the work. Running a successful restaurant was not so different from running a theatrical production.

At One Fifth, a restaurant in Greenwich Village, he rose from waiter to general manager, developing the customer base that would stay with him throughout his career: magazine editors and television producers, actors and comedians, the young thrusters of New York's media and entertainment scene who would one day become its grandees, such as Wintour and Lorne Michaels, the creator of Saturday Night Live.

As an outsider, he thinks he was able to capture something about New York that the natives missed. It's like Antonioni caught London in the 1960s in Blowup. Outsiders don't lose that first impression. With my restaurants, I'm always trying to recapture those feelings I had in 1975. It's the clichés about New York: the friction between the buildings; the fact that the shops and the delis were open all night long; that taxis were accessible and available. Everything seemed quick, accessible and energetic. Coming from the East End, I felt like a straitjacket had been pulled off me.'