New York City restauranteur Keith McNally has outed musician Patti Smith for her rude behavior.
McNally, who is behind such NYC restaurants as Balthazar and Minetta Tavern, has a new memoir coming out, I Regret Almost Everything. In an excerpt shared by New York Magazine’s Grub Street, he writes about Smith driving a server to tears back in the ’70s.
The incident occurred at the Manhattan restaurant One Fifth, where McNally was working. He writes that Smith would often dine there with her ex-boyfriend, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and art curator Sam Wagstaff.
“On nights when Wagstaff wasn’t at the table, Smith and Mapplethorpe could be very difficult to wait on,” he shares. “Smith, unfortunately, was incredibly rude to the servers.”
He writes that on one occasion Smith made a server cry “because she forgot to put bread on the table.” McNally adds, “[I]t’s impossible for me to listen to a Patti Smith song today without remembering her reducing a waitress to tears.”
McNally says that Smith and Mapplethorpe gave off “the surly appearance of young, rebellious artists (which they were),” although he had a better opinion of Mapplethorpe than Smith. He noted Mapplethorpe “could be terse,” but “he never tried to belittle [servers] the way Smith did.”
I Regret Almost Everything is due out May 6.
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