A TikTok creator who posts as MAD-LEN (@notenoughfreckles) said in a story time video, “Currently having the table from hell right now, and there’s 8 of them.”
She said she was still setting drinks when one guest tried to order. “As I’m putting the waters down on their table, the woman goes, and we’re just gonna go ahead and order right now,” she said.
She said the party had just sat down. “Okay, let me put down the drinks first, Queen. I’m not stopping you,” she said. She added, “You just literally sat down, water’s brought to the table, and we’re gonna go ahead and order right now.”
The server said fry requests, drink changes, and an aisle blockage followed the first order
She said a child ordered a cheeseburger, and the woman asked about sides. She described the exchange as, “whoo, and what do you have for sides for that? Fries?” She said she answered, “No, we don’t have fries,” and that the woman replied, “Okay, so just fries.”
She said she repeated, “Fries? We don’t have fries. Sorry.” When the woman asked, “So what do you have?” she said she thought, “A menu, b–ch,” and began listing sides “off the top of my head, off dome.” Such entitled behavior from customers is a recurring theme in restaurant stories, as seen when a woman loses her patience over a few minutes with her drinks.
She said she told them, “We don’t have fries. We have potato chips and mac and cheese and mashed potatoes,” and that the woman asked for fries again. “She looks at me like I just took her purse,” she said.
She said the woman ordered an Arnold Palmer. “And did you want that with sweet tea or unsweet tea?” she said she asked. She said the woman chose “Unsweet,” then, after the drink arrived, said, “This is still too sweet. Could I just get an extra cup and another tea unsweetened?” Such confrontations between servers and difficult patrons are not uncommon, as when a server in Houston confronted a woman over a coworker’s receipt.
She said the same guest ordered a dip-and-chips appetizer and asked, “And can I also get potato chips with that?” She said she answered, “Yeah, of course,” and put the plate in the middle of the table.
She said the woman then told an older guest next to it that she was not going to eat it. After the older woman asked, “What?” she said the first woman added, “It’s crab, do you think you’re going to have some?”
“How is that my problem? I didn’t put the food in her mouth, I put it on the table,” she said. She said she later moved the appetizer toward the woman who had complained. She said the woman pushed it away and said, “It’s not all for me.”
“If you’re gonna be the food police, I’m gonna put that in your jurisdiction, lady,” she said. She also said she paused filming because she was “too busy providing stellar service to the table to continue my video.”
She said that after the appetizers were down she asked, “Do we need anything else over here right now?” expecting salt, pepper, ketchup, or napkins. She said another guest answered, “Yeah, can we just get the kids’ food?” She added, “Yeah, you guys ordered 7 minutes ago.”
She said that when the kids’ food arrived, she asked again about condiments and napkins. She said they told her no, “like, we got the food,” and “look at me like, hello, are you stupid?” She said that while she went for the adults’ food, some guests walked to the service station themselves. “That’s my job,” she said.
She said the husband of the woman she called the “food police” sat at another table, pulled a chair close to the eight-top, and stood in her path. She said that when she tried to get through, “he just looked up at me and like, smiled at me.”
She said she thought, “Who are you? Have you guys been to a restaurant before?” She said that when the check came, the couple was gone. “Guess who’s gone? Food police and her husband. Bye-bye!” she said.
Seth Gerber, managing partner of the MIDA restaurant group in Boston, wrote in Food & Wine that service should not mean servitude. He argued that the customer is not always right and that removing a guest should be a last resort after staying calm and stating the restaurant’s side.
Viewers of the TikTok focused on the fry exchange and swapped their own floor stories. One comment repeated the line that drew the most attention in the video and paired it with a SpongeBob image. The commenter wrote, “We don’t have fries.”
Another commenter described staying late with a table that, they said, walked behind the bar after closing and made drinks while the bartender was shutting down. They wrote that they said, “you can’t be back here?????” and that a guest replied that no one was there to serve drinks because the bartender “had stepped away because she was CLOSING DOWN THE BAR for the night….”
Some viewers questioned a burger order without fries as a side. One commenter asked, “wait, you sell burgers with no fries? isn’t that against the law?”
A reply called the missing side unusual. That commenter wrote, “Very weird. What restaurant doesnt have f–king french fries as a side?”
Another reply pushed back on the idea that every restaurant must serve fries. That commenter wrote, “Not everyone wants to serve fries, you’re weird as hell.”
One commenter said the eight-top did not sound that severe compared with the tourist traffic they see at work in Memphis, Tennessee. They wrote, “Honestly this doesn’t sound bad lol but I work in a very touristy area in Memphis TN so I’m well versed. You have to learn to have comebacks and not take things personally.”
Published: Aug 27, 2026 05:42 am