“Yikes,” Serena Williams wrote after she was allegedly turned away from a rooftop restaurant at a luxury hotel in Paris during the Paris Olympics. The retired tennis player, who has won four Olympic gold medals, took to X to complain about the restaurant she was hoping to dine at while in the city for the Olympics. She was trying to go to a restaurant at The Peninsula Paris with her kids, Olympia Ohanian, 6, and Adira Ohanian, 12 months.
“Yikes @peninsulaparis I’ve been denied access to rooftop to eat in a empty restaurant of nicer places 🫠 but never with my kids. Always a first. 🙄,” Serena wrote on the platform.
While being turned away from an empty restaurant could seem suspicious, the hotel explained that the restaurant was actually fully booked, despite appearing empty.
“Dear Mrs. Williams, Please accept our deepest apologies for the disappointment you encountered tonight,” the Peninsula Paris wrote on X. “Unfortunately, our rooftop bar was indeed fully booked and the only unoccupied tables you saw belonged to our gourmet restaurant, L’Oiseau Blanc, which was fully reserved.”
“We have always been honored to welcome you and will always be to welcome you again,” the hotel added in a second X post.
On X, some called Serena “entitled” for assuming that she could get a table at the restaurant without a reservation — during the Paris Olympics, no less — then complaining about it on social media. Others defended her.
“How come yall didn’t say that when she was still there?” one person wrote.
“Y’all probably made a table available for certain others, I bet!” another person commented.
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While some praised the restaurant for honoring reservations even if a celebrity walks in, others said that if Serena Williams walks into your restaurant, you can find a table for her.
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“It’s Serena Williams – you make a table for her!” one person wrote on X.
As it turns out though, a source told Variety that the person working at the rooftop restaurant at the time allegedly didn’t recognize her when she came in.
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Maxime Mannevy, another staffer at the restaurant, told the outlet that she wasn’t working at the time, but Serena looked “unrecognizable” to her colleague.
“When she came there were only two tables available and they had been reserved by clients of the hotel,” she explained to the outlet. “My colleague didn’t recognize her and feels terrible, but he told her what he would have told any other client, which is to wait downstairs in the bar for a table to become available.”
She added that it was “absolutely nothing personal.”