James Corden No Longer Welcome at Balthazar
Manhattan restaurateur Keith McNally has had enough of the "tiny cretin"
Update: James Corden has been unbanned from Balthazar. That was fast.
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Should James Corden find himself in New York’s SoHo neighborhood with a hankering for a seafood tower, he is going to be shit out of luck. The singer/comedian is now banned from pricey French restaurant Balthazar, per an Instagram post from the bistro’s owner, Keith McNally. Apparently Corden was too rude even by Manhattan standards, and is not welcome back.
As you can see in McNally’s characteristically long-winded caption (paired with what appears to be one frame of a GIF), the Cats star was an asshole not once, but twice. In the first instance, he found a hair in his meal and showed it to his server “after eating his main course.” In my humble opinion, you cannot eat the dish the hair was in and then complain about it, but maybe something is being lost in translation here. What is crystal clear is that after showing the strand to his server, Corden demanded another round of drinks and then insisted that all of the drinks be taken off of the tab. Rude, certainly, but kind of run of the mill rich person rude.
The second instance of Corden’s bad behavior came about a week ago, when his wife ordered an “egg yolk omelette.” According to the manager’s report McNally is quoting in his post, “A few minutes after they received the food, James called their server, M. K. and told her there was a little bit of egg white mixed with the egg yolk.” The dish was remade, but instead of a side salad the kitchen served it with home fries, which was enough to make the man behind Carpool Karaoke lose his mind.
“You can’t do your job! You can’t do your job,” Corden allegedly said to the server, “Maybe I should go into the kitchen and cook the omelette myself!”
Now, about this omelette. What exactly is an “egg yolk omelette?” you might be asking yourself. I called Balthazar to see if they had an answer for me, and was sent to voicemail. Originally I thought it was just a standard omelette, and that McNally was using the term to differentiate from an egg white omelette. But Corden’s complaint specifically stemmed from the fact that there was egg white in the omelette, leading me to believe that his wife explicitly asked for there to be no whites at all in her dish. Google “egg yolk omelette” and you will find a recipe for “banana egg yolk omelette” from a blog called “Boob to Food.” Apparently the egg whites aren’t good for babies under 10 months, so maybe Corden’s wife is a baby. That would explain why he was speaking for her.
Corden’s rude behavior is something of an open secret for people who pay attention to celebrity gossip. Those in the know will point to the time he tried to do an Ask Me Anything on Reddit alongside Ben Winston, and the post was instantly flooded with people telling stories about him being a nightmare. That this is becoming public knowledge only because his baby wife couldn’t handle a little white in her omelette is just, well, delicious.
