When a well-known, long-time restaurateur calls you “the most abusive customer” to ever patronize an establishment in its 25 years, it might do you some good to grovel, or even spare a crumb of remorse. But it seems late-night jester James Corden feels as though the whole conversation about his table manners is just a little below him.
“I haven’t done anything wrong, on any level,” he tells The New York Times. “So why would I ever cancel this? I was there. I get it. 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 seems Corden’s opted to take the high road—sorry—the high and mighty road, to cast his eyes down upon people who think treating service workers like shit is detestable. He’d instead rather put on the hater blockers, deny deny deny, and talk about his new series “Mammals,” in which he plays a Michelin star chef, which can only be characterized as laughable after all *widely gestures* this.
“It’s strange. It’s strange when you were there,” Corden says on the subject. “I think I’m probably going to have to talk about it on Monday’s show. My feeling, often, is, never explain, never complain. But I’ll probably have to talk about it.”
He doesn’t seem to internalize this personal mantra of “never complain” too much, as indicative of his reported behavior at Balthazar, but certainly feels compelled to “never explain,” especially when it comes to what the hell an egg yolk omelet is .
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Corden then takes a strange moment to remind everyone that Twitter is not necessarily reflective of the real world, and in this augmented reality, “Hillary Clinton is the president of the United States.”
“Should we not all be a little grown-up about this?” he says. “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.”
In responseBalthazar’s owner Keith McNally says this:
I’ve no wish to kick a man when he’s down. 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 abused to my servers? Whatever Corden meant, his implication was clear: he did n’t do it. Although I didn’t witness the incident, lots of my restaurant’s floor staff did. They had nothing to gain by lying. Corden did.
I wish James Corden would live up to his Almighty initials and come clean. 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. 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.
Your move Corden.
.