It’s a phenomenon you’ve likely encountered: You get to a restaurant and a host informs you it’ll be a long wait—perhaps longer than you can last—to get in. One ex-server thinks that some restaurant hosts can be “passive-aggressive” with this news… but others in the service industry are totally OK with that.
The video exploring passive-aggressive hosts comes from Karen Deanda, a Los Angeles-based creator who specializes in, as her bio notes, “server skits from an ex server.”
In her May 31 TikTok video, which has brought nearly 44,000 views since going up, she pretends to be a host who encounters a couple looking to eat at her restaurant. It’s in the vein of past Deanda videos the Daily Dot’s written about, including one about customers who interrupt a server’s greeting and one about customers who don’t tip when they don’t like the food.
“Hi, can I help you?” she begins. “The wait is really long right now, so I don’t know if you’re gonna stay and wait. It’s an hour and a half.”
@karen.deanda they’re always trying to get you to leave #greenscreen #serverlife #serverproblems #hostessproblems ♬ original sound – Karen
Then, amazed that someone might want to stick it out that long, she says, “Oh, you want to stay? OK, it’s a really long time. Are you sure about that?”
She goes on to observe, “I mean, personally, I could never wait that long, but just some people really love it here, huh?”
While the creator was looking to be funny, it hit a nerve with some commenters who took it quite seriously.
“Literally me when i worked at roadhouse bc i wanted the wait to go down so i could leave,” one observed.
Another person, on the other side of that equation, said, “The hosts at texas roadhouse always are so rude.”
One pondered, “Why would someone wait that long? Unless it was a really trendy restaurant, idk why.”
“In nyc there are so many places where the hosts act like this,” someone else said, finding this to be “unwelcoming.”
One offered, “Usually it’s the host doing it for the servers cuz we don’t want tables anymore.”
But it gave perspective to one server, who said, “I didn’t realize how it came out until I thought about it lmao.”
The Daily Dot has reached out to the creator via TikTok comment.
