Tracy J. Renshaw is suing Outback Steakhouse for $1.5 million after alleging she slipped on mashed potatoes and fell at a Sterling, Virginia, restaurant in May 2023. The lawsuit, first filed in county circuit court on March 5, 2025, reached federal court after Outback asked on May 27, 2026 to remove the case to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Renshaw says she was walking to the restroom at the Sterling location on May 14, 2023 when she encountered a slippery foreign substance that appeared to be mashed potatoes on the floor. In her complaint, she says the spill caused her to fall face forward onto the hard restaurant floor, leaving her with serious and permanent injuries, pain, lost working capacity and hospital bills. She also alleges there was no warning posted about the hazard and that the restaurant should have inspected the floor, removed the substance within a reasonable time and warned guests about the danger.
That is the basis for the restaurant mashed potato lawsuit now moving through federal court, where the fight is no longer just about a fall but about whether the floor condition was there long enough to have been found and fixed. Outback Steakhouse has denied that any substance on the floor caused the fall, said it did not know of any defective condition and argued there was no duty to post a warning. The company also disputed Renshaw’s claims of serious injury and raised assumption of risk and contributory negligence as defenses.
The dispute turns on a basic but decisive question: what, exactly, was on that floor, and how long had it been there before Renshaw fell? For now, the record shows a plaintiff demanding seven figures over an alleged restaurant slip-and-fall and a defendant saying the condition was not as described and should be treated as denied. The next step is the federal case itself, where the evidence behind that gap will have to be tested.
