You may know James Corden from the ubiquitous Carpool Karaoke sketches lifted from his Late Late Show on American TV network CBS, which he’s hosted since 2015 but plans to leave next year.
If you’re an early adopter, you may know him from Gavin & Stacey, the winningly acerbic sitcom set in Wales that he co-wrote and starred in for three seasons from 2008. And if you’re a glutton for punishment, you may know him from Cats, widely regarded as one of the worst movies of 2019 – or pretty much any year at all.
But over the past week or so, many people have come to know James Corden as something else entirely: the kind of customer who fills restaurants and their staff with fear and loathing, a boorish complainer who sends food back and demands to get his meal, and his drinks, for free.
And with that gauntlet thrown down, it seems everyone has been rushing to chip in with tales of their own about how the affable Brit is actually an ’orrible prat.
James Corden hosts The Late Late Show.Credit:CBS
How did this all start?
It started with an omelette. Not just any old omelette, mind - an egg-yolk omelette ordered by Corden’s wife, Julia Carey, on October 9 at fancy New York City restaurant Balthazar. When it turned up, there was apparently a tiny bit of egg white in with the yolk, and it was sent back. When the new dish arrived it came with fries instead of salad. According to the restaurant manager’s duty report, “That’s when James Corden began yelling like crazy to the server: ‘You can’t do your job! You can’t do your job! Maybe I should go into the kitchen and cook the omelette myself!’”
The manager sent complimentary champagne to the table and Corden calmed down, though he reportedly continued to be “nasty to the server”.
How on earth do we know this?
Because the owner of the restaurant, Keith McNally, posted the manager’s report on Instagram last Monday for all the world to see.
That’s a little unfair, isn’t it?
If it were a one-off, probably. But McNally – a London-born former actor who once shared an apartment with legendary Vogue editor Anna Wintour and is one of New York City’s most successful restaurateurs – insists it illustrates a pattern of behaviour from his compatriot.
Corden with his wife Julia Carey at the 2019 Tony Awards.Credit:AP
“James Corden is a hugely gifted comedian, but a tiny cretin of a man, and the most abusive customer to my Balthazar servers since the restaurant opened 25 years ago,” wrote McNally, who suffered a massive stroke in 2017 that left him struggling to speak but in no way diminished his capacity to dish.
As further proof he cited another instance in which Corden produced a hair, after finishing his main course, allegedly saying: “Get us another round of drinks this second. And also take care of all of our drinks so far. This way I [won’t] write any nasty reviews in Yelp or anything like that.”
What has Corden said about all this?
According to McNally, soon after his post went viral Corden called him to apologise. “Anyone magnanimous enough to apologise to a deadbeat layabout like me (and my staff) doesn’t deserve to be banned from anywhere,” he wrote, again on Instagram. “Come back to the 5 & dime, Jimmy Corden, Jimmy Corden. All is forgiven.”
So that was the end of it?
Are you kidding? First, the incident was enough to send keyboard warriors in search of evidence of Corden’s priors - and there is plenty of it. Behaving (by his own admission) like a prat when accepting an award for Gavin & Stacey in 2008; getting into a spat on stage with Patrick Stewart (though the blame for that lay more with the older man); increasingly arrogant behaviour (detailed in his 2011 memoir May I Have Your Attention, Please?) as the first flush of fame went to his head (“If I was in company and the conversation wasn’t revolving around me,” he wrote, “I would just switch off”).
Balthazar, the New York restaurant at the centre of the James Corden row.
There were traded barbs with Ricky Gervais, an ill-advised bit of palling around with Donald Trump’s media spokesman Sean Spicer (in 2017 Corden kissed him on the head), there was even a strange (and possibly apocryphal) story about Corden leaving his wife to do all the parenting of a screaming baby on a flight.
So is he cancelled?
Not exactly. Corden has a new dramatic series called Mammals about to drop on Amazon Prime Video (irony of ironies: he plays a Michelin-starred chef who goes off the rails). He’s already made the call to leave his chat show on his terms after eight years, and he has hinted that he may address this whole messy business on Monday night’s (US time) episode.
One thing’s for sure, though: he won’t be getting a table at Balthazar any time soon. Just as the dust appeared to be settling in the wake of his apology for the Balthazar brouhaha, an interview appeared in The New York Times late last week in which Corden said: “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.”
Uh-oh. I think I can feel a Keith McNally Instagram post coming on …
You bet. “I wish James Corden would live up to his Almighty initials and come clean,” the restaurateur wrote after the article appeared. He added his staff “had nothing to gain by lying. Corden did”.
Corden, meanwhile, hasn’t updated his own social media accounts for weeks. But that hasn’t stopped the hecklers flooding in to post comments like “Justice 4 the Balthazar Staff”.
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2022-10-24 04:30:00Z
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