Why Some Are Applauding This IHOP Employee For Turning Away Adam Sandler

It's hard to deny that IHOP knows its way around a stack of griddle cakes. Even if you happen to prefer a fluffier pancake or one fried in butter, IHOP's uniformly golden brown pancakes can be hard to turn down. The question, therefore, is not whether or not you want pancakes at any given moment, but rather, how long you might be willing to wait to get your stack.

Apparently, for comedian, musician, filmmaker, and all-around likable star, Adam Sandler, the answer is somewhere between "30 minutes" and "not at all." As shown in a now-viral TikTok video (which appears to be a clip of security camera footage), when Sandler recently visited an IHOP location, an employee informed him that there would be a long wait for a table. As the employee, Dayanna Rodas, confirmed in her TikTok post, the wait time would have been 30 minutes. That was apparently longer than Sandler — and presumably, his daughter, who accompanied him — wanted to stand around waiting for pancakes. 

Sandler and his companion left, and that would have been that except for one small detail: Rodas didn't realize the person she'd turned away was Sandler until after he'd already exited.

Sandler was treated like every other IHOP customer

In the TikTok video, IHOP employee Dayanna Rodas is seen breaking the bad news to Adam Sandler that if he, and what appears to be one of his teenage daughters, wanted to eat at IHOP, the wait would be 30 minutes. Sandler looks disappointed. Shrugging his shoulders, he quickly ushers his companion out the door, albeit not so quickly that Rodas didn't have time to figure out that they had just turned away Adam Sandler.

"Pleaseee come back," Rodas captioned the video, which also included footage of their face with a clown filter. Clearly, Rodas had some regrets about not pushing Sandler to the front of the line. But many TikTok users are applauding them for that very thing. "U were doing your job," RamelWithATikTok wrote, for example. "I mean nobody deserves special treatment if everybody else is waiting," Money Boy agreed. 

That being said, the cheers for Rodas were not to the exclusion of giving Sandler credit for not having attempted to cut the line by saying, "Do you know who I am?" In fact, many TikTok praised Sandler for not wielding the "celebrity card." Moreover, many agreed that Sandler's reaction was not just "normal" but fully relatable. As MyDogBearKicksAss wrote, "I am a nobody, and I don't wait 30 minutes either."