Because Keith McNally shares the receipts.

New York has always had its restaurant majordomos, colossi bestriding their narrow host stands, ushering in the elect and the elected, frowning on the disfavored. But theirs has largely been a whispered language unshared with, and indeed inscrutable to, uninitiated ears. But not at Balthazar. Keith McNally, its irascible owner, broadcasts it with a bullhorn. McNally adores his customers, except the ones he loathes, and both have a way of making appearances in the theoretically for-his-eyes-only managers’ reports from the restaurant (and its sibling establishments, Pastis, Minetta Tavern, and Morandi) that he publishes for mass consumption on Instagram.

These reports are full of delicious gossip of the most picayune, and therefore most perfect, variety: table choreography, appetizer agita, who is good (and receives free Champagne) and who is bad (non-tipping customers, food critics he considers corrupt, Graydon Carter, his ex-wife, and, once, this reporter). These feuds are usually small and local, tempests in teapots. But a recent face-off with James Corden over bad behavior at Balthazar went wide (he scolded servers about a hair in his salad and stray egg whites in his wife’s egg-yolk—yes, yolk—omelet). The 15-day back-and-forth of bannings and unbannings, apologies and denials, escalated all the way to the national airwaves. At the New York City Marathon, someone held up a sign encouraging runners to “Run like James Cordon [sic] Is Seated in Your Section at Balthazar.” McNally, naturally, posted it.

With his Instagram vérité, McNally has brought his brasserie into the age of the docusoap, another set on which to stage the dramas of the rich, famous, and badly behaved. Just this fall, a Balthazar brunch report noted a reservation made by a fake Connecticut politician (“No such senator … by that name exists”); at 4:28 p.m. on Halloween, Leonardo DiCaprio walked in for dinner on the patio at Pastis. Restaurants have always contended with gossip and bad press, but McNally may be the first to vertically integrate, publishing his own scandal sheet in real time. Will it threaten his celebrity business? Not likely. With l’affaire Corden still fresh in the air, Sienna Miller, Tony Hawk, and Antoni Porowski all had brunch at Balthazar, a fact we know because McNally told us. That same day, an unnamed guest sent back their eggs Benedict (overcooked). For now, the suspect remains at large.