Your Texas Roadhouse Server Hates When You Commit This Faux Pas
Eating too many rolls before your meal is one mistake you can make at Texas Roadhouse, but it's not the only one. Look, it's easy to be a good patron of the Roadhouse. You sit at your table, order the chain's best-selling sirloin steak cooked just the way you like it, and kick back to listen to some boot-scootin' music and watch the servers line-dance in the aisles. Hold up a second ... about those line-dancing servers? Yeah. Don't walk through the middle of their performance!
A TikTok user who didn't specifically name her restaurant of employment — but left zero doubt that it was Texas Roadhouse, based on contextual hints — enumerated some server pet peeves specific to America's top casual restaurant. Not listening to your waiter or waitress when they ask you how you'd like your food is a general issue at any eatery, no matter how humble or high-brow. Germane only to Texas Roadhouse, however, is the thorny problem of the line dance, which servers are required to participate in at most locations.
According to the TikTok server, it's downright galling when customers barge through the middle of the aisle while servers are dancing. "They will still, like, with their freaking bags of food and their baby carrier, and their stroller [...] they will just walk right through all you dancing," she griped, wondering why folks couldn't either navigate around the spectacle or simply wait out the 90 seconds or so that it takes for the dance to be over.
The line dancing requirement already piques many servers
On Reddit, a would-be Texas Roadhouse bartender realized the job was not in their cards when the requirement to line dance once a shift came up. "I asked them to cancel the interview and left," they wrote. One philosophical response offered an explanation for why servers might be willing to undergo this potentially humiliating ritual: "It's just what you're willing to do I guess. My cousins both worked at [R]oadhouse in college and made killer money there. They felt the dancing though annoying was worth it." Anecdotally, it seems many servers don't actually enjoy the theatrics of kicking their heels up to Garth Brooks or Morgan Wallen at proverbial gunpoint; the Western-steakhouse equivalent of singing for your supper.
It's not just the servers, either. Also on Reddit, a customer asked: "Why in the world does Texas Roadhouse make their servers do a line dance every half hour and disrupt their guests dinner by turning the music allllll the way up," reserving special ire for a manager who reportedly told her it made servers happy and gave them a cardio workout.
Even if you personally adore the campy drama of servers line dancing, there's a good chance they don't love it themselves, and are possibly even annoying some of your fellow diners by doing so. Ultimately, this is the decision of Texas Roadhouse's corporate leadership, but you can do your part to not make things worse by barging through the middle of the performance.