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James Corden repeatedly asked the restauranteur Keith McNally to remove a withering Instagram post from his account in which he called the Gavin & Stacey star “abusive” and a “tiny cretin of a man”, McNally has claimed.
In 2022, Corden was forced to publicly apologise on his US chat show after the notoriously blunt McNally – the man behind legendary New York restaurants including Balthazar and Pastis – lambasted his behaviour towards his staff.
In the post, McNally claimed that Corden was “extremely nasty” to one manager, and on a second occasion screamed at a member of staff: “you can’t do your job! Maybe I should go into the kitchen and cook the omelette myself!” McNally used the post to announce that Corden had been banned from the restaurant, something he reversed days later.
Speaking to The Telegraph, McNally said that Corden “texted many times asking me to take [the post] down”, with McNally agreeing to remove it if Corden admitted to his behaviour. He added: “I enjoyed the power I had over him too much.”
While Corden did hold his hands up to being poorly behaved at Balthazar, McNally’s Instagram post is still online nearly three years later.
In 2022, Corden initially dismissed McNally’s post, telling The New York Times that barely anyone was aware of the allegations about his behaviour, saying: “I haven’t done anything wrong, on any level … I feel so Zen about the whole thing. Because I think it’s so silly. I just think it’s beneath all of us. It’s beneath you. It’s certainly beneath your publication.”
A few days later, however, Corden opened an episode of his chat show by admitting that he’d made a mistake.
“Because I didn’t shout or scream, I didn’t get out of my seat, I didn’t call anyone names or use derogatory language, I’ve been walking around thinking that I haven’t done anything wrong,” he said. “But the truth is I have made a rude, rude comment. And it was wrong. It was an unnecessary comment, it was ungracious to the server.” He also vowed to apologise in person to the staff affected.
In conversation with The Telegraph, McNally said that no famous person had been rude to his staff since the Corden saga, and named Woody Allen as the most “consistently charming” person to dine at his restaurants.
McNally also invokes Corden in his new memoir, I Regret Almost Everything, claiming that the musician Patti Smith “reduced a waitress to tears” in the Seventies when he ran the New York eatery One Fifth. McNally describes Smith in the book as “the James Corden of her day”.
English (US) ·