Del Posto and Babbo have the same celebrity chef as an owner, reputations for impossible-to-get reservations, and customers who can afford, say, Del Posto’s seven-course “menu tradizionale” at $145 a person. It is not unreasonable to imagine that a good number of those customers make a living on Wall Street.

So their reaction after word spread on Wednesday that Mario Batali had mentioned them in the same breath as Stalin and Hitler was to let their hefty wallets do the talking and threaten to cancel their hard-won reservations.

Some complained on Twitter, some on the Bloomberg terminals they use to follow the markets. A food Web site, Eater, said one investment bank had even circulated a memo saying it would not reimburse receipts from Babbo or the other restaurants in Mr. Batali’s group.

“The irony is that he has made millions of dollars building a restaurant empire off the backs of Wall Street wealth,” said a senior executive at a large investment bank who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters. The executive, who said he had eaten often at Babbo and Del Posto, said he would not go back to any restaurant that Mr. Batali was involved with.

Advertisement Continue reading the main story

Mr. Batali made the remarks at a Time magazine event on Tuesday promoting its “Person of the Year” issue, which will appear next month. Time assembled a panel of celebrities to talk about who should be chosen Person of the Year and continue a tradition dating to 1927.

Photo

There, in comfortable tan chairs, were personalities like Brian Williams, the NBC News anchor; the law professor Anita Hill, who accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment 20 years ago; and Jesse Eisenberg, the actor who played the Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg in the film “The Social Network.”