A New York City server recently recounted an experience where they literally had to go out of their way—as in, to a whole other restaurant—to complete a customer’s request.
In a viral TikTok video viewed more than 460,000 times, user Benton McClintock (@bentonmcclintock) shares how a customer requested lasagna at the Mediterranean restaurant McClintock works at.
“I was like, ‘this is a Mediterranean restaurant. We don’t have lasagna,” the server recalls telling the customer in the video.
The customer insisted that the restaurant had made lasagna for her before, but McClintock urged that the customer must be mistaken.
“‘I don’t think they’ve ever done that for you before, maybe pre-gentrification when this was still Little Italy, it might’ve been an Italian restaurant,’” McClintock says.
It’s been reported that NYC’s Little Italy has considerably shrunk over the years as rents have increased.
@bentonmcclintock Lasagna 🥰 #fyp #servingtips #nyc #littleitaly ♬ original sound – Benton McClintock
McClintock claims he then offered to go to a nearby restaurant and purchase lasagna for the customer with their credit card and come back and plate their food.
“So we literally did that,” he says. “She orders lasagna from a restaurant like a block away, and she gives me her credit card and I go get her the lasagna [in the] middle of my shift. We weren’t like crazy busy so it wasn’t that big of a deal. And plated her lasagna and served it to her. It was kind of iconic. I was like, ‘She knows what the fuck she wants.’”
Commenters largely found no fault in McClintock’s decision to get the food from another restaurant.
“I would have done this just for the cig break on the walk,” one commenter said.
“You are too good for this world,” another person said.
The Daily Dot reached out to McClintock via TikTok comment and Instagram direct message.
