A former British Airways flight attendant has hit out at New York restaurateur Keith McNally after he used a photo of her in a now-deleted Instagram post that took aim at James Corden and his alleged bad behavior towards wait staff and airline employees.
Corden hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons last week when McNally said in a separate Instagram post that he had banned the Late Late Show presenter from his Balthazar brasserie in New York’s SoHo because Corden had been rude to his staff.
McNally went as far as to call the 44-year-old English comedian “the most abusive customer” the restaurant had seen in its 25-year history. “I don’t often 86 a customer,” McNally wrote in his October 17 Instagram post, referring to the code commonly used in the hospitality industry to indicate that a menu item is no longer available.
Or, in this case, to indicate that a customer has been banned. “Today I 86’d Corden. It did not make me laugh,” McNally’s post continued.
The post, unsurprisingly, went viral and adding fuel to the fire, McNally featured Corden in several other Instagram posts. One of those posts featured a photo of ex-flight attendant Ellie Toyn.
The post was about McNally’s experience on a recent British Airways flight from New York to London in which the flight attendant allegedly told him that she didn’t “much care for Corden” either, although the flight attendant’s behavior seemed pretty odd.
The only problem was that Toyn wasn’t the flight attendant and she didn’t much like the apparent insinuation that she was the crew member being referred to.
“Tell me how it’s okay for this man to use an image of me without my consent in his drama with (James Corden),” Ellie wrote.
“I’VE NOT WORKED FOR BRITISH AIRWAYS FOR OVER A YEAR, yet he’s using my face as a cover for his story. This is vile behaviour and completely thoughtless,” her post continued.
McNally quickly got in touch, saying he didn’t mean to offend Ellie and that he “just wanted to use a random photo of a BA airline attendant to illustrate an incident that recently happened to me flying BA”.
“My post certainly wasn’t about you personally,” McNally wrote. “I just deleted the post. Again, my apologies”.
In his most recent Instagram post on the Corden drama, McNally wrote that he was lifting the ban after Corden issued an on-air apology on the Late Late Show. In fact, McNally wrote that he had behaved worse than Corden in the past and was going to 86 himself from Balthazar for two weeks.
