I don’t remember exactly what I said, though I did not raise my voice to the point beyond where people in the kitchen could hear it. I told the chef that his behavior was making me and others uncomfortable. I let him know that I thought it was mean. And I asked him to cut it out. I don’t remember exactly what he said in response, but whatever it was, I found it irritating enough that I reminded him that I was paying to eat there and told him again to stop berating his staff at that volume.

Maybe 20 seconds after I had returned to my seat, he approached the table. He apologized, barely, 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.

I’m not naive about restaurants. People who work there sometimes yell, though usually out of earshot. And when I eat in a higher-end establishment like this, I try to respect the artistry of the proprietor. I ask to have the food cooked the way the chef thinks it’s best. I don’t ask for salt. I don’t ask for skim. (I do ask to have different gelato flavors in separate bowls, knowing full well that “They don’t do it that way in Italy!” They have it wrong in Italy, too, but I digress.)

In this particular instance, however, something didn’t feel right. I don’t know if Mr. Forgione had been watching too much Gordon Ramsay on television or had learned the wrong lessons from his mentors. Listening to him in action, however, conjured up the particular type of nausea that results from watching people yank their misbehaving kids around on the subway or seeing my own kid smash a defenseless insect.

When I called him on Monday to tell him I was writing this post about the evening, Mr. Forgione, in fact, said that I had scolded him like a child on Saturday night. “First and foremost, you came into my kitchen and spoke to me very disrespectfully in front of my cooks,” he said. “The kitchen is a sacred space.” He told me that my reply to his attempts to explain why he was yelling, while I was in the kitchen was, “We’re not interested.” That sounds about right, since we hadn’t come to the restaurant to listen to him yell repeatedly at his staff about whatever it was that he thought they were doing wrong.

That wasn’t what got us kicked out though, according to Mr. Forgione. He claimed that he didn’t decide to ask us to leave until he explained to us tableside that his yelling was all in the interest of making everything perfect. “Well you aren’t,” he remembers me saying. “And then,” he continued, “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.”

As with any confrontation, you always think of ways you could have handled it better in retrospect. It would have been more polite to ask for our friends’ endorsement before marching into the kitchen (Sorry Luke! Sorry Jen!). And as my better half noted later, my comments might have had more moral force had they not been a request at all. I could have simply told him that we weren’t going to sit there and listen to him abuse his employees and that we were leaving. Once I dressed him down in front of his staff, I imagine his manhood suffered enough that he had no choice but to kick us all out, lest he lose face. Perhaps a woman should have gone to talk with him instead, one on one.

So I could have handled myself better. But my comments hardly rose to the level of disturbance or nastiness that Mr. Forgione displayed. He now says that he was aware of the problem and was planning on making it up later to everyone within earshot by comping dessert and whatnot, even before I invaded his space.

Still, I’m not sorry I spoke up, and Mr. Forgione wasn’t interested in apologizing to me either.

Is either one of us right or wrong? What would you have done if you were me, or if you were Mr. Forgione?

According to his account on Diner's Journal, Lieber was dining at Forgione's eponymous restaurant when he heard the chef-owner dressing down a kitchen staffer. Fed up, Lieber up and walked into the kitchen and "told the chef that his behavior was making me and others uncomfortable. I let him know that I thought it was mean. And I asked him to cut it out." Forgione immediately went to Lieber's table and, per Lieber, "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." He then asked Lieber to leave.

Yesterday, Lieber called Forgione for his version of the story ("you came into my kitchen and spoke to me very disrespectfully in front of my cooks," Forgione is quoted as saying. "The kitchen is a sacred space"). But Forgione has more to say, and he tells Grub Street he's not happy that Lieber is "making me sound like I'm some psycho."