What Does It Actually Take To Be Banned From a Restaurant for Life?

As restaurant errors go, bringing a patron an egg-yolk omelet with a bit of white in it does not sound like a recipe for disaster. But toss in a side order of fries instead of a salad and pour in two celebrities who are masters of their respective universes, and what should have been an innocuous and entirely forgettable incident turned into something much more last week.

The brouhaha between Keith McNally and James Corden seems to have left a bit of egg on the faces of both. Longtime restaurateur-to-the-stars McNally took to Instagram to call late-night talk show host Corden “the most abusive customer to my Balthazar servers since the restaurant opened 25 years ago.” He continued: “I don’t often 86 a customer, to day [sic] I 86’d Corden.”

(Mealtime with Mister Manners is a column that delves into a smorgasbord of modern-day dining dilemmas. Please submit your etiquette questions at the bottom of this page.)

A case for Maxwell Smart?

It would nearly have taken the bumbling luck of Agent 86, as played by the late Don Adams on television’s "Get Smart," to have sorted out the string of apologies, words of forgiveness, downplaying, amplifying and hand-wringing that resulted over the next seven days. The histrionics ultimately died down with Corden issuing an all-out mea culpa on his eponymous show this past Monday night and McNally responding by closing the whole ugly chapter with an Instagram post that announced: “I’m going to lift the ban on Corden and ban myself from Balthazar for 2 weeks.”

If any further proof were needed of the sarcasm implied in the oft-quoted phrase “Celebrities, they’re just like us,” surely this was it.

Doing the math on eighty-sixing

The distasteful skirmish begged the question: Is eighty-sixing (or canceling) a customer actually a thing? Do restaurants ever take the drastic step of telling a patron never to darken their door again? Though exceedingly rare, it seems the answer is yes. And not just as part of publicity stunts, such as New Orleans eatery Blue Oak BBQ's banning non-customer Mike Evans of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for his unsportsmanlike conduct during a September game against the Saints. Or business-saving measures such as a Chinese restaurant’s denying future entry to a famed live-streamer who was devouring its profits as fast as he was racking up views for his binges of its all-you-can-eat menu.

When clients cross the line

Lee Skeet, chef and proprietor of the 12-seat restaurant Cora in Cardiff, Wales, has had a full house in his seafood-focused establishment since opening in January. And though the vast majority of his guests have been grateful for the opportunity to sample the cuisine of a toque whose background includes a stint at the Michelin-starred restaurant Hedone, in London, one group in May proved a glaring exception.

Six customers Skeet describes as “arrogant men in suits" were condescending and insulting to his lone staffer, 22-year-old Lily Griffith. Once they had gone, she emotionally recounted to her boss the abuse she had been enduring all night long.

"They’d been talking down to her, saying things like, ‘Why can't you get a proper job?’ and ‘You must have to work seven days a week to make any money,'" Skeet recounted. Dissatisfied with one of the wines they had been served, one of the patrons even grabbed Griffith by the arm and insisted she smell the bottle.

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The tale made the chef’s blood boil, and he immediately fired off an email to the customers requesting their banking information so he could reverse their tab, asserting he wanted nothing to do with their money before concluding: “I would thank you to never come back to my restaurant.”

After screenshotting and tweeting the email, Skeet and Griffith received an unanticipated avalanche of support. With more than 130,000 likes to date, his Twitter missive garnered the attention of outlets from the BBC to The Mirror, with reporters swarming his intimate restaurant. The David-and-Goliath quality of the incident delivered just desserts when news leaked that the law firm where the patrons worked had launched an internal investigation into its employees’ behavior.

Skeet never did hear from the rude customers. And just as well, because he changed his mind about the refund and decided to give the entire tab — £1,000 — to Griffith as hazard pay.

A delicate dance

Georgette Farkas, former director of marketing and public relations for chef Daniel Boulud and herself the proprietor of the late, lamented fine-dining establishment Rotisserie Georgette on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, called to mind the one occasion that nearly caused her to eighty-six a patron, albeit less publicly than Skeet did.

“I had an incident with a customer who was not just rude, but extremely racist with some of my staff,” she recalls. Though Farkas was not in the restaurant at the time of the incident, she practiced what she would say upon the patron’s next visit: “I'm sorry, sir, but this restaurant is not a good fit for you.” When the customer did indeed come back, Farkas — a professional who is known in the industry for her gentility — was torn between standing by her principles of human decency and abiding by those of hospitality. She ultimately opted for the latter.

“I will forever feel bad about that because I felt like I hadn’t stood up for the dignity of my staff,” she said. If she’d had the chance to relive that interaction, she is confident she would have followed her conscience.

The struggle is real

In an industry whose core mission is to feed and delight its patrons — charmless though they can sometimes be — turning a blind eye to a certain degree of boorishness comes with the territory.

Michael Balsamo, a restaurant professional for more than 20 years, including stints with BR Guest, the BLT Steak group and Main Street Restaurant Partners, recalled a particularly demanding patron who minced no words with a host who couldn’t seat him immediately.

“He didn't want to wait, so he started cursing at her," he said. When the same patron came back for a meal a few days later, Balsamo made it a point to let his feelings be known: “If you have an issue, you can talk to me, but I won't tolerate that sort of behavior toward my staff,” he told the patron.

Reflecting on what seems to be an increase of hostility by customers in restaurants, Balsamo finds no comparable scenarios in other industries. “Mistakes happen at the doctor, they happen at the mechanic, they happen at the grocery store. Do you yell at your doctor if they don't call you right back in five minutes? Hospitality seems to take the brunt of people's displeasure.”

It’s hot enough in the kitchen

It’s time entitled, demanding and outright rude patrons dialed it down. Just because a server is trained to be gracious and understanding does not give any customer the right to dish out abuse. You may not be eighty-sixed, but if you start using heated language, you may find yourself in a place nearly as dreaded and far colder — restaurant Siberia.

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This article was originally published on TODAY.com