The venue is Thornton's in the Fitzwilliam Hotel on St Stephens Green in Dublin. It has one Michelin star. There's a table of 7. A venison dish arrives for one customer and on account of being deemed "insubstantial" the diner requests a side order of French fries. Main courses are eaten and dessert menu presented. Still no fries. Diner attempts to cancel order whereupon furious eponymous chef appears --
"He said to Glenn in no uncertain terms: 'We don't have French fries on the menu. These were ordered for you. They were cooked specially for you, so you eat them, you d***head' and he threw them down on the table," Mr Murphy [another diner] claimed.
The Irish Times (subs. req'd) has all the details. The chef denies this version of events but admits using bad language and all sides agree that the seven customers were asked to leave. Now the fact that the fracas apparently took up a fair bit of time on the call-in show Liveline may say something about the priorities of Celtic Tiger Ireland, but the chef apparently did draw the support of other customers there the same night, at least as regards their own level of service.
Anyway, our own non-expert verdict: (1) A table of 7 is the outer limit of what's feasible in a premium restaurant, as it seriously stretches the order flow in the kitchen, so the sudden side order may have been the straw that broke the camel's back, but (2) if the restaurant really didn't have fries, the waiter should have suggested a potato alternative when the initial request was made. However if the request came as an order for "chips", the chef was right to be furious.
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