A giant mirror crashed onto diners at the hip SoHo hotspot Balthazar Friday morning — injuring a former French government big who then lifted the mirror off fellow diners “like Superman,” witnesses said.
The dining room was packed at Keith McNally’s famed French brasserie at 80 Spring St. when the roughly 10- by 15-foot mirror came loose and fell from the wall about 10:09 a.m.
The mirror struck Arnaud Montebourg, 52, France’s minister of industrial renewal from May 2012 to last August, on the head, causing him to unleash a torrent of curses, witnesses said.
“He swore a lot and said ‘It was a f–king nightmare’ in French,” a witness told The Post. “He was surprisingly nonchalant but slightly pissed off.”
But the plucky Frenchman, 52, helped lift the heavy mirror from on top of other diners and then applied ice to his head before he was rushed to Bellevue.
“This gentleman was able to kind of hold this huge mirror on his own until the other people came up and started helping him,“ said Sofia Mena, 35, visiting from El Salvador. “He was like Superman!”
Sources said Montebourg was dining with Aurélie Filipetti, a French politician and novelist.
Another witness, Karen Hoffman, and her daughter Marissa of Boston were feasting on waffles, eggs and toast while celebrating Marissa’s 16th birthday when the mirror came crashing down.
“We were just eating our breakfast. We were sitting there and I believe the mirrors were bolted into the wall, and it must have given way and fell on top of the people who were sitting directly under it,” she said.
She and other diners and staff ran to the tables and lifted the heavy mirror off the stunned victims, she said.
“We were holding the mirror up. It was a lot of commotion, yelling and commotion happening, and we were trying to get people out. Luckily no one seriously hurt,” she said.
Cops and firefighters arrived within moments, she said, and tended to the injured.
“Everybody was saying ‘Thank God no one was seriously hurt,” Hoffman said.
Earlier reports that Taylor Swift was at Balthazar proved incorrect.
Sally Sliman, 58, a tourist from Cleveland, saw several people trapped beneath the fallen mirror – one of several that hung from the eatery’s walls.
“It was pretty terrifying. They were pinned underneath, two women and a gentleman and his wife,” Sliman said. “I thought the glass was going to shatter,“ she added,but luckily it didn’t.
“No one got seriously hurt, we’re very lucky” said the restaurant’s director of operations, who declined to give his name.