Buffalo Wild Wings server puts her foot in her mouth with racist comment to guest
#DiningWhileBlack. The restaurant company said it fired a server after she made thoughtless comments about Blacks while taking an African American customer's food order
A customer at a Houston-area Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant says her server made outright degrading racial remarks while taking a meal order from her, but the company says the employee has been fired.
Customer Tasha Lee told Houston’s KRIV that she was about to order a meal at the Tomball, Texas location and smiled at her server, who’d asked for her identification. The server then said, “Don’t take this racially, but sometimes the only way you can tell with Black people is from their eyes and their smiles, because it’s so dark.”
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Lee said she’d been to that particular Buffalo Wild Wings store in the past but had never run into this particular server. She said she was stunned.
“I was in disbelief, I was shocked,” she told the station. “It was hard to believe that I had heard what I heard.”
The server, who Lee says was white or Latina, attempted to make up for the gaffe by offering that her son-in-law and her grandson are both Black.
Management stepped in to fix it before it could get worse.
The restaurant replaced Lee’s server and gave her the meal for free. They also sent her a $10 gift card to make up for the racial fracas.
The restaurant also sent KRIV a statement: “The employee in this case no longer works for Buffalo Wild Wings. We value an inclusive environment and have no tolerance for discrimination of any kind. We’ve offered our deepest apologies to the guest.”
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Lee told the station that even though the restaurant responded quickly, she wanted to share her story to raise awareness.
“To tell a Black person that the only way you can tell it’s them from their picture is from the whites of their eyes and the whites of their teeth — it’s totally unacceptable,” Lee said. “While this was the first time this has happened to me so overtly, this is a normal experience for African Americans everywhere.”
