James Corden knows what happened at Balthazar restaurant the couple of times he was accused of abusive behavior toward the staff.
“I was there. I get it,” he told the New York Times on Thursday.
But, “The Late Late Show” host continued, “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.”
Actually, it wasn’t beneath anyone.
Corden explained to NYT reporter Dave Itzkoff that he hadn’t canceled their sit-down interview because “I haven’t done anything wrong, on any level.” That’s despite being very publicly banned (as a “a tiny Cretin of a man”) and then unbanned from that New York City eatery earlier this week.
The unbanning happened late Monday after Corden phoned and “apologized profusely” to restaurateur Keith McNally, proprietor of Balthazar and the force behind that ban hammer.
But Corden’s new comments to the New York Times didn’t land well with McNally. He wrote Friday on Instagram that although he wasn’t present, he had taken the word of a number of his floor staff who said they witnessed Corden doing several things wrong.
Things like allegedly demanding rounds of free drinks after he found a hair in his food, so he didn’t have to write nasty reviews on Yelp. And losing his mind after an egg-yolk omelet — quickly remade due to an offending chunk of egg white on the plate — came to the table with home fries on the plate instead of the requested side salad. (The New York Times story’s withering headline? “James Corden Would Rather Not Talk About That Omelet.”)
“STORM IN A RESTAURANT TEACUP. I’ve no wish to kick a man when he’s down,” McNally wrote Friday. “Especially one who’s worth $100 Million, but when James Corden said in yesterday’s NY Times that he hadn’t done ‘anything wrong, on any level,’ was he joking? Or was he denying being abusive to my servers? Whatever Corden meant, his implication was clear: he didn’t do it.”
McNally said his staff “had nothing to gain by lying” about the incidents, but “Corden did. I wish James Corden would live up to his Almighty initials and come clean.”
Corden, meanwhile, seemed more interested in discussing the parallel worlds found online and in real life. Clearly, he thought the restaurant uproar was happening only in the former.
“Should we not all be a little grown-up about this?” he told Itzkoff. “I promise you, ask around this restaurant. They don’t know about this. Maybe 15 percent of people. I’ve been here, been walking around New York, not one person’s come up to me. We’re dealing in two worlds here.”
Corden noted that if he lived on Twitter, “Hillary Clinton is the president of the United States and Jeremy Corbyn won by a landslide.” The news media’s amplification of social media, he said, was like a school principal who offers to assist school bullies.
In other words, it was McNally, not Corden, who was the bully? The late-night host told NYT that he might discuss the situation Monday on his CBS telecast.
But McNally made the outgoing late-night host another offer Friday, albeit one slathered in sarcasm.
“If the supremely talented actor wants to retrieve the respect he had from all his fans (all 4 of them) before this incident, then he should at least admit he did wrong,” the restaurant owner wrote. “If he goes one step further and apologizes to the 2 servers he insulted, I’ll let him eat for free at Balthazar for the next 10 years.”
Most commenters on the post recoiled in horror at the idea of Corden having a shot at free food, and one warned that the performer was a “hungry animal” who could eat Balthazar out of business in short order.
Then there was the commenter who laid down the real truth about the celebrity.
“He was in Cats,” the person wrote, referring to the widely maligned 2019 film. “That’s not forgivable.”