Going out to eat alone is perfectly fine (and in fact should probably be more normalized), and it’s natural to end up ordering several things on the menu when you want to try a variety.
What isn’t fine is having the restaurant make you feel uncomfortable for what you’ve ordered. Judge all you want behind the scenes (though maybe don’t do that either), but at least have the decorum to be polite when the customer is around.
Unfortunately, this woman didn’t quite get that treatment.
Was This Really A Wild Order?
In a TikTok with over 211,000 views, content creator Mary (@stylebyqueenmary) recounts a night out at a seafood restaurant in New Orleans that went sideways fast.
Mary explains that she was visiting the city and decided to try the local seafood, ordering crab legs, shrimp, corn, sausage, and plenty of crawfish. The food, especially the seasoning, was delicious.
The waitstaff wasn’t quite as pleasant as her meal, she says.
“I could hear them saying, like, ‘She about to eat all that food. Like that’s a lot of food for her. Why does she order all that?’” she recounts.
Mary says workers were walking by, looking at her table, making faces. At one point the manager came over, asked how she was enjoying herself, and walked away and went straight to the group of employees that were talking about her, according to Mary.
Mary says she was on the phone with her sister at the time and tried to brush it off, but they kept going.
“I am uncomfortable, and if you know me, you know I do not like confrontation,” she says.
Eventually, she says she hit her limit. When her server came by, Mary said what was on her mind.
“‘I’m really uncomfortable right now. You guys are talking about me. I can hear you. I can see you. This is not the experience that I was hoping to get,'” she says she told them.
One of the employees who had been talking about her walked over to ask if everything was OK, per Mary.
“I already informed her on what’s going on. If you want to know what’s going on, you can have that conversation with her,” she says.
The bill came out to $117, which would usually warrant about a $23 tip, but not this time, she continues.
“Tipping means that the experience was good,” she says. “The food was good, but the experience was not good.”
“I Was So Embarrassed My goodnesss!!!” she added in the caption.
In a comment, she identifies the restaurant as Willie’s Boil House. BroBible has reached out to Willie’s Boil House via email and will update this if they respond.
Is It Ever OK To Skip The Tip?
First, some context on where tipping culture stands right now, as people face tipping fatigue with having to tip everywhere with a tablet checkout screen.
According to Delish, two separate studies found that 74% of respondents said tipping is out of control, and 59% have a negative view of tipping overall. A YouGov survey found that 50% of people would leave zero tip after bad service. And 65% of tips, per additional data cited by Delish, are given solely to avoid uncomfortable interactions, not because people actually want to tip.
But etiquette experts draw a line when it comes to sit-down restaurants.
Diane Gottsman, an etiquette expert and owner of the Protocol School of Texas, says it’s pretty much never okay to leave nothing at a full-service restaurant, even after a rough experience.
Her reasoning is that multiple people are often sharing that tip, and stiffing the server can penalize people who had nothing to do with what went wrong. Her advice is to flag the manager, possibly get the meal comped or discounted, and leave somewhere in the 10–15% range rather than zero, with 20% being the baseline for good service and no less than 15% as a general floor.
Lizzie Post of the Emily Post Institute agreed, telling the Washington Post that at a full-service restaurant, leaving a tip is non-negotiable, no matter what, and that speaking to management is almost always the more effective move.
Food & Wine offered more of a server’s point of view. Veteran waiter Darron Cardosa writes that while he personally overtips out of principle, there are a few exceptions.
“No one goes to a restaurant to be verbally abused by a stranger,” he writes.
Beyond explicit insults, he flags two other scenarios where a lesser tip is justified: clear apathy (when a server repeatedly ignores requests and shows no interest in actually serving you) and any kind of discriminatory behavior. But he points out that things like overcooked food, unavailable menu items, slow kitchen times, and restaurant ambiance shouldn’t factor into the tip since those don’t reflect on the server.
Commenters React
“Mind you crawfish isn’t filling at all, everyone knows this. I wouldn’t tip either,” a top comment read.
“As someone from New Orleans, I eat seafood regularly.. We order 5 pounds of crawfish and sides regularly, like……. What restaurant was this?” a person asked.
“I would have wrote on the tip line ‘y’all talk too much…’” another said.
“Crawfish barely had any meat!?! Why were they so worried about that. Also higher bill=higher tip. Why screw that up?!” a commenter wrote.
@stylebyqueenmary I Was So Embarrassed 😭 My goodnesss!!! #embarrassing #seafood #relatble #fyp #seafoodlover
BroBible reached out to Mary via email and Instagram direct message for comment and to Willie’s Boil House via email. We’ll be sure to update this if she responds.