Restaurant owner reveals ‘incredibly rude’ A-list singer Patti Smith ‘reduced waitress to tears’

Before Patti Smith became a rock icon and punk poet laureate, she was a regular face at one of New York City’s buzziest restaurants and not, it seems, for all the right reasons.

Keith McNally, the man behind some of Manhattan’s most celebrated dining spots, has claimed that Smith brought a waitress to tears during a visit to a New York City restaurant in the 1970s.

According to People, the famed restaurateur reflected on the incident in an excerpt from his upcoming memoir, “I Regret Almost Everything”, shared by New York Magazine’s Grub Street.

At the time, McNally was working as general manager at the downtown eatery One Fifth.

In his tell-all book, he claimed Smith often came in with her ex-boyfriend, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and art curator Sam Wagstaff.

McNally wrote, “On nights when Wagstaff wasn’t at the table, Smith and Mapplethorpe could be very difficult to wait on. Smith, unfortunately, was incredibly rude to the servers.”

He said Smith’s behaviour stuck with him for decades. 

“It’s impossible for me to listen to a Patti Smith song today without remembering her reducing a waitress to tears.”

McNally described Smith and Mapplethorpe as having “the surly appearance of young, rebellious artists.”

But he said it was Wagstaff who stood out to him.

“I found Wagstaff to be the most interesting of the three.”

He added that Mapplethorpe “could be terse,” but said, “he never tried to belittle [servers] the way Smith did.”

Even though McNally still sees Smith in a negative light, he has warm memories of Wagstaff, who passed away in the ’80s.

He wrote, “There are only two or three people in life that I wish I’d known better. Sam Wagstaff was one of them.”