Rude restaurant customer leaves waitress fake $100 tip in cruel April Fool’s joke
Too cruel for April Fools.
On April Fool’s Day, a restaurant in Texas got a guest’s $27 bill sent back with a $100 tip written on it — with a note scrawled in marker with the message, “April Fools Dummy, No Tip 4 You!”
A photo of the receipt at El Cacique Taqueria in Baytown, TX, circulated on social media and sparked a debate on whether the bogus tip should be charged to the customer’s credit card anyway.
The manager of the restaurant, Isis Gomez, who waited on the prankster, told The Post that although the receipt was signed, she did not take the tip.
“Just to make sure they don’t come back and claim the money, I just didn’t charge the $100,” said Gomez, 20, whose mother, Yesenia Sanchez, owns the 60-seat restaurant near Houston.
“It was a lot of money and since it was a joke, I wasn’t sure if I should or not. I also talked to my mom about it because she’s the boss, and she was like, ‘No, don’t charge it because we don’t want to get a claim after that.'”
Gomez said the guest in question was a thirtysomething man eating breakfast alone.
She went on to explain that no one in the eatery took a photo of the receipt, so she assumes the customer himself did, and that’s how it made its way to various TikTok, Instagram and Facebook pages.
“I saw a bunch of people reposting it. I didn’t realize it would go that far. I had a lot of people call the restaurant saying, ‘Hey, is this the restaurant that the girl didn’t get the $100 tip?’ All the sudden everybody knew about it,” she explained.
One woman who rang the establishment said she felt so bad for the waitress that she wanted to set up a GoFundMe campaign in order to reclaim her lost tip, but Gomez declined the offer.
El Cacique Taqueria did get one silver lining from the disrespectful and disheartening transaction — an increase in customers.
“We got a little bit of business from it,” she said. “I had two tables come in because of everything. They said, ‘Hey, we saw the post’ and were reposting pictures of our food.”
Queens resident and waiter Darron Cardosa, who runs the Instagram handle Bitchy Waiter, posted it on his page with the question, “If they signed for it, I think the tips stands. What do you guys think?”
The post received morethan 600 comments from his followers, many of whom are servers, and most said they would take the cash.
“Signed and totaled … jokes on you,” one said.
“It’s f–king gross someone would even think this is funny. Take the $100,” another added.
Cardosa, who has been a waiter in New York City for 25 years, told The Post he would have also accepted the money.
“I would 100% cash in that tip because it’s a signed agreement. Sometimes customers leave tips and then get home and change their mind and call the restaurant or credit card company to have the tip removed,” he explained.
“It so seldom works in favor of the server so I would take this opportunity when I could.”
