Brian's Throng

Since Manhattan restaurateur Brian McNally opened the Odeon, the paradigm for TriBeCa bistros, in 1980, with his brother Keith, his empire of eateries has risen like a steel-girdered souffle. The Odeon and its siblings Cafe Luxembourg and Indochine have all far exceeded the average active life span of highvisibility dinner haunts. While Keith has gone on to nightclubs with Nell's, Brian keeps racking up the restaurants. His most ambitious project at the moment is the bar-cafe-restaurant complex for Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell's epic undertaking, the Royalton Hotel, set to open midyear. But until then, the London-born McNally is occupying himself with such side-dish ventures as the Canal Bar (where the revelers above celebrated after Julian Schnabel's Whitney Museum opening) and a Brazilian restaurant in SoHo, with lively Brazilians-about-town Sylvia Martins and Nessia Pope. The McNally formula: try to find a place "where it's already a little bit worn," and avoid publicity "in the normal sense, because publicity always looks like publicity."

B.B.