In the last week or so there has been an onslaught of extremely juicy stories centered around celebrities misbehaving in restaurants. In case you’ve been living under a rock, New York restaurateur Keith McNally went viral after he banned The Late Late Show host James Corden from his Balthazar restaurant — and then revoked it — for allegedly acting like an asshole. The story had a surprisingly long life in the news, fueling an ongoing obsession with celebrity restaurant gossip.
Immediately after the Corden story, service industry workers around the world began sharing their own brushes with celebrity claims. In his forthcoming memoir, Your Table Is Ready, Michael Cecchi-Azzolina, a former head waiter at Raoul’s and Le Coucou in New York, talks about harrowing experiences with then-actress Meghan Markle and Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. Cecchi-Azzolina claims model Naomi Campbell was a particularly terrible customer; An unnamed New York Post source also names and shames huckster life coach Tony Robbins and basketball player Dennis Rodman. But why exactly are we so obsessed with hearing stories about celebrities mistreating workers?
Aside from the fact that everyone loves to hear about a good tantrum, our culture has decided that mistreating waiters is one of the lowest forms of bad behavior. Even people who have never worked in the service industry know that the work is brutal and the customers can be even worse. Many people don’t go on a second date with a person who is a bad tip or a jerk to the waiter, and some employers even use restaurants as a kind of barometer of how a person might behave as a manager. There are many of us who won’t even send a wrong dish back to the kitchen for fear of being perceived as legitimate.
As such, these misbehavior stories are essentially the opposite of the countless gossip rag assurances that celebrities are “just like us!” posted alongside photos of famous people going to the grocery store and picking up dog poop. This coverage of “ordinary people” is a particularly effective form of celebrity currency: perhaps to justify our obsession with famous people, we’re thrilled to participate in this myth-making because it makes us feel closer and more like, the celebrities who we adore. As Slate’s Ruth Graham wrote, it blends their “magic into our everydayness,” and everyone wins.
But when we hear of a celebrity being self-titled or otherwise goofy towards service workers, it’s a stark reminder that these people actually live in a very different world from the rest of us: a world where Mistakes wiped away before James Corden’s wife can ever see streaks of egg white in their egg yolk omelet, and no one ever says “no.”
For other celebrities who have already been described as nightmares, like Campbell and Wintour, the impact of a scandal like this is greatly minimized. But for James Corden, who has traded with his family-friendly, “nice guy” persona throughout his career, accusations that he treats “the little people” like dirt while flattering all the celebrities on his TV show reveals the work that goes into crafting his “Aw Shucks” persona and the disconnect that often exists between public and private. If he’s not the guy who has charmed millions on Carpool Karaoke, then who exactly is he?
Unsurprisingly, a chic restaurant like Balthazar — which is also a favorite of Wintour, Sienna Miller and Meryl Streep — serves as a forum for this debate. It’s perhaps the most common example of the “haves,” or people who can afford to spend hundreds of dollars on a single dinner, mingling with the “have-nots,” the people who prepare and serve that dinner to them. If a person misbehaves in this room – in public! with people around! — Which monsters do they have to be private?
Conversely, the James Corden controversy has also inspired people to share their experiences with celebrities who were actually great. We’ve learned that Patrick Stewart is a generous tipper and that Conan O’Brien will fire your ass if he catches you being mean to a waiter. It’s a relief to learn that your loved one is actually a good person – or more cynically, that they at least have enough sense to know that they must act properly in public if they are to keep this self-created magic alive.
But feel-good stories will always have a much less viral quality than the negative ones, because there’s nothing the gossip-consuming public (myself included) loves more than glee—especially when that glee involves moral superiority.
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