“The Bear” star Jeremy Allen White recalled a time when a hostess scolded him for “ruining” everyone’s dinner at a fine dining restaurant in Chicago.
Allen appeared on Thursday’s “Hot Ones” to promote his new film “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” and of course, the topic of his Emmy-winning show “The Bear” also came up. Host Sean Evans asked if Allen had a “most memorable food experience” in Chicago, given the fact that the actor films there for the hit FX series.
“I’ve had wonderful, wonderful meals there,” Allen said before naming some of his favorite Chicago eateries, including Oriole, Bavette’s Bar & Boeuf and La Scarola. That’s when he opened up about a humiliating incident he had at Chicago’s fine dining restaurant Alinea, which happens to be one of the jobs Ayo Edebiri’s character Sydney Adamu boasts on her resume.
“I went there before I shot ‘The Bear.’ I was 23 years old. I had no business being in a restaurant that nice,” Allen explained.
“I was chugging champagne, and I would go out every five minutes for a cigarette,” Allen said. “I was thinking, ‘My god, this dinner is taking such a long time. Why is this dinner taking such a long time?’ It’s two hours, three hours, four hours.”
While he was frustrated with the wait time, Allen explained that the restaurant was frustrated with him for continuously exiting and reentering the building.
He continued: “Eventually, I’m coming in after my 12th cigarette of the night, and the hostess says, ‘Every time you go out for a cigarette, the whole kitchen is getting f—ed. Everything is getting screwed-up; you’re ruining not only your own dinner, but the dinner for every single guest here. You need to stop leaving this restaurant.’”
By the end of the story, Allen said it was all a learning lesson for him, and he still enjoys Alinea.
“So that was a fun experience I had, or at least I learned something in a very great Chicago restaurant that I did not know how to appreciate yet,” Allen said.
You can watch White’s full “Hot Ones” interview in the clip above.
