(FORTUNE Magazine) – Two things don't get served at the River Cafe: locally caught striped bass and General Electric CEO Jack Welch. Health officials caution against eating the fish; a sign in the entrance warns Welch and other GE execs to keep out of the upscale restaurant. It goes on to cite "General Electric's flagrant, pernicious, and continuing pollution of the Hudson River spawn-ing grounds of the striped bass," among other things. Restaurateur Michael "Buzzy" O'Keeffe, who grew up fishing the surrounding waters, put the sign up back in 1985.

While legal responsibility is a touchy issue, it's a fact that a GE plant in Hudson Falls, New York, routinely and legally discharged waste materials called PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) into the Hudson River. It's also true that when the potentially harmful effects of PCBs came to light in 1977, the company ended the practice. The dispute now is what to do about the existing PCBs, still there in the riverbed. Some environmentalists want them dredged out. GE, which no doubt would be asked to pay, says that would worsen things by stirring up the pollutants. The company also cites environmental reclamation efforts it has underwritten and points to the Hudson's recent ecological comeback.

On the surface GE would seem to have a point. The Hudson is cleaner and more hospitable to marine life than it has been in years. Over 206 species of fish (including the striped bass), plus other marine animals, are thriving. The environmentalists attribute the river's improvement to other factors and argue that PCBs remain a problem, notably for Buzzy's favored striped bass. Sure, he grouses, "you can catch the fish now. It looks beautiful. It fights beautiful. But you can't eat it."

Buzzy says his sign, and one posted in his other riverside restaurant, the Water Club, is "only for the top corporate guys like Welch." He even takes it down when GE-owned NBC rents the place for parties. He figures his executive exclusion policy cost him about $100,000 in business last year alone.

--Michael H. Martin