Restaurateur Who Banned James Corden Names 1 Other Rude Celebrity Client

New York City restaurateur Keith McNally, who once banned former CBS talk show host James Corden from his Balthazar eatery for abusing the wait staff, is now accusing another celebrity of rudeness — beloved singer-songwriter and award-winning author Patti Smith.

In an excerpt published Thursday from his new memoir “I Regret Nothing,” McNally recalled Smith, her ex-boyfriend Robert Mapplethorpe and art curator Sam Wagstaff regularly eating at the One Fifth restaurant he managed in the 1970s — and Smith being rather abrasive.

“At the time, I found Wagstaff to be the most interesting of the three,” wrote McNally in an excerpt published in New York Magazine. “I still do today. On nights when Wagstaff wasn’t at the table, Smith and Mapplethorpe could be very difficult to wait on.”

“Smith, unfortunately, was incredibly rude to the servers,” he continued. “It’s impossible for me to listen to a Patti Smith song today without remembering her reducing a waitress to tears because she forgot to put bread on the table.”

Smith won the National Book Award in 2010 for her bestselling memoir “Just Kids,” which chronicled her bohemian life as a struggling artist and her relationship with Mapplethorpe — a now-celebrated photographer who died at 42 from complications with HIV in 1989.

“Although Mapplethorpe, with his tough-boy leather-jacket image, could be terse with the servers, he never tried to belittle them the way Smith did,” wrote McNally, adding that Mapplethorpe was “friendlier to the staff” on the rare occasion that he took his jacket off.

Representatives for Smith did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

McNally famously called out Corden on Instagram in 2022 for being “the most abusive customer” at Balthazar “since the restaurant opened 25 years ago,” and explained that Corden — whom he called “a tiny Cretin of a man” — was banned for yelling at a server.

McNally later updated his fans to announce that Corden had called him up and “apologized profusely,” which the restaurateur noted had officially reversed the ban. Whether Smith’s alleged behavior five decades ago prompted a similar exile at the time remains unclear.