Be gone, nasty customer

Sure, it got hot this week, but tempers reached boiling point at celebrity chef Jared Ingersoll's Danks Street Depot on Tuesday.

For the first time in his 26 years in the business, Ingersoll ejected a customer whom he said was ''not just obnoxious, but a truly awful person''.

Surely just another case of a precious celebrity chef acting up? Absolutely not, says Ingersoll.

PS called after Ingersoll, a regular on television and feted as one of the country's top chefs, had taken to his Twitter account to warn other restaurateurs: ''If you sell food in or around the Waterloo area watch out for hungry 3 foot tall harridan, peroxide, big glasses & 'heat effected' little dog.'' He then followed it up with: ''You'll recognise her because she will be followed by a brunette that looks like an overweight Gollum, if you see them coming ... hide.''

Ingersoll explained it was ''a series of small things, they didn't want to order off the menu so we made something special for them, and that wasn't good enough and both dishes were sent back. Then they started demanding other things ... they were just horrible to deal with.

''I consider myself a hospitality professional, we are pretty thick-skinned. I don't care if you are a nice person or a bad person, I will always go out of my way to make sure you feel great but there are some people out there who are just quite horrible. I told them to leave, not to finish their food but to simply get up and leave.''

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald, 12 January 2013