Of all the people to throw out of your restaurant, a writer for the New York Times is probably one of the last ones you want to boot. But chef Marc Forgione did just that on Saturday night, ejecting Times columnist Ron Lieber—presumably without realizing who he was—from his Tribeca restaurant. And today Lieber used his unique position at the Times to broadcast the ugly scene to the world.
Lieber is not a food columnist (he files the "Your Money" column), but his post on the Times food blog, Diner's Journal, delves into the incident in great detail. According to him, he was dining with friends when Forgione twice brought the dining room to a hush by upbraiding a server in the semi-open kitchen. When "loud, sustained, top-of-lungs yelling" finally became unbearable, Lieber charged into the kitchen and let Forgione know that his meal was being disturbed, and instructed him "to stop berating his staff at that volume."
Less than a minute after Lieber returned to his table, Forgione arrived to "barely" apologize "and then let me know that he thought it was incredibly rude of me to come into his kitchen and tell him how to do his job. I repeated the fact that he had been ruining my dinner. But his yelling was all in the interest of maintaining quality, he said. 'I think it’s time for you to go,' he said. 'Are you kicking me out?' I asked. 'Yes,' he replied."
When Lieber called Forgione yesterday to inform him that he had thrown out a reporter for the Paper of Record, the chef explained, "The kitchen is a sacred space." And Lieber had defiled it! Forgione told Lieber that after he apologized, "You waved a hand in my direction as if I was an annoying bug. Someone who acts like that in my restaurant, I would never serve." The inevitable fallout from this is that every sacred kitchen in New York is going be adding photos of every single Times reporter to their profile wall of dining critics. Because not screaming in a kitchen is clearly not an option.
