But I guess that's just tones in a language we'll never understand. Like how to many western people, even whispered sweet nothings in Japanese sound like death threats.
At the store I used to work at, we had a middle-aged woman from Italy as a cashier. One of the absolute sweetest people I've ever known who was always friendly and helpful. When I was a supervisor, I got more complaints from customers about her than any other employee. I have a very good ear for emotional tone and can control my own to the point where I've only had a small handful of outright blowups with customers over several years, so it didn't take me long to figure out the cause.
The normal speaking intonation of the cashier in English carried over from her Italian, and it mapped almost exactly to the pitch changes that an American uses to be sarcastic or dismissive. Once you've triggered the "I've been treated rudely!" switch in somebody, it's next to impossible to get them to unruffle their fur. I tried explaining this phenomenon to some of the customers but it never worked. In fact it happened once with a friend of mine, and afterward I explained the whole situation in detail, and at the end the reaction was STILL, "Yeah, but she was rude to me." Aaargh.
So I just gave up and told customers from then on the usual BS answer of "sorry about that, I'll have a talk with her," then deleted the incident from my mind.
That's probably part of what we're hearing in the hostess, intonations that map to negative connotations to our ear, especially when we don't understand the words to put it all in context.