On Saturday night, for the first time in my life, I was kicked out of a restaurant — Restaurant Marc Forgione in TriBeCa.

It’s a good restaurant, with a great cocktail and a clever bread operation.

But that’s as far as I got into the meal. About ten minutes after my party of four sat down, we heard yelling — loud, sustained, top-of-lungs yelling — coming from the kitchen. Mr. Forgione was dressing down a member of the staff, in full view of many of the customers. The dining room quieted as patrons exchanged uncomfortable glances.

No one said a thing though. Soon the target of the chef’s harsh words delivered our amuse-bouche, and the poor guy was so rattled he could barely speak above a mumble.

A few minutes later, the chef was at it again. Fifteen seconds. Another fifteen. And without much forethought, I pushed back my chair and walked through the open doorway of the kitchen.

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?