Eighty-six TikTok.
As a rash of ridiculous menu hacks threatens to give fast food chains serious indigestion, at least one Waffle House location is refusing to let entitled customers make a hash of restaurant tradition.
“Order from the menu. We are not making anything you saw on TikTok,” reads a posted warning — captured in a video from TikTok user @officialgodbodycash — on top of the cash register inside what appears to be an Atlanta-area location of the Southern all-day breakfast slinger.
“TikTok taking over everything except Waffle House,” the user joked.
The scrawled sign alerting guests to the stern new — if unofficial — policy appears on the heels of wildly-popular posts to the social media site like one from user @shantellxoxo, showing off a plate-sized bacon cheeseburger served on a waffle bun, served with a side of pickles. The gargantuan concoction, posted with the hashtag #pregnancycravings, snagged over 5.7 million viewers in just six days.
Commenters sprang to Waffle House’s support chiming in in the comments.
“SICK of the TikTok specials,” one user wrote.
“Thank God, when I was waitressing, people always wanted to change the menu,” another said.
Not everyone felt the same way.
“So the internet is giving them more business and they don’t want it?” one user questioned.
Custom menu items a la TikTok have been a kitchen nightmare for fast food workers finding themselves wasting time and resources attempting to recreate the viral items.
Some of those same chains, however, have occasionally attempted to lean into the viral food craze — Starbucks even added the Pink Drink, a strawberry acai libation with a hint of caffeine and coconut milk, as an official menu item in 2017 after it exploded in popularity on social media.
And more recently, fast casual chain Chipotle, particularly prone to menu hacking thanks to a highly-customizable menu for online ordering, allowed customers to use a TikTok “hack” that turns a standard steak quesadilla into something like a Philly cheesesteak.
Waffle House, meanwhile, made national headlines recently when a now-former employee went viral for swatting away a chair thrown by a customer during a brawl in a reported act of self-defense. As a result of the incident, said to have taken place in 2021, the employee claimed she was blacklisted from the company.
Waffle House did not immediately return a request for comment.