So it’s green eggs … and mouse. Try it. You may like it picky spouse.
Really being unable to give even one of six choices a go is childish.
Hell I’ll put myself as that person. They all sound disgusting to me. (Hard to imagine with that diversity; a vegetarian main is always safe.) And I know that this was something my SO had done for me trying to do something nice for me. I’m going to appreciate it damn it.
And as the OP I would be really irritated if my SO wouldn’t try to enjoy it with an open mind.
I’d guess moreso since, I would think, the OP knows their SO pretty well and was not picking a place the OP had reason to think they would not like. If it was an expensive restaurant that was popular were they serving food many would not like?
But, I do not know them so this is only speculation.
Sounds like many dinners I’ve had on a cruise. The dining room menus are pretty much exactly like what you’re describing. When there was nothing even minimally appealing we went to the buffet…
So for either of us (and for every friend or family member I can think of), I’d pick a couple of restaurants where they have either something I KNOW they’ll like, or someplace with a wide assortment… of entrées anddesserts.
My wife would love to have me present a couple of those restaurants, and she’d google their menus and pick one.
I was trying to think of an instance where this might happen in my life, and I realized that Mr. Legend hates capers. Not in an “I’ll put these to the side of my plate” kind of way, either. Capers in a sauce permeate the food to the extent that he really can’t choke it down. So if all six of the options were liberally sauced with capers, this could happen. I’d ask him what he’d like to do, and I suspect we’d go to a different restaurant.
For a local diner, no, they have people really cooking all of that stuff. And, famously, the Cheesecake Factory does too. No one’s saying it’s health food but every single thing on their Tolstoy-length menu is made fresh daily.
Back in my undergrad days, I was part of a group of friends that would take the weekend before Christmas at a buddy’s folks’ place up north. It was mostly beer-drinking, music blasting, letting loose after the semester, kind of weekend. Food was of the half-dozen cans of Puritan chili or beef stew, and dinner rolls from a supermarket variety. Nothing fancy, and never would be fancy. Just a bunch of guys whose memories of the weekend would be of a walloping hangover.
Until the year one of the boys (Randy) invited himself a chef. Well, the “chef” was actually studying at culinary school to be a chef; and honestly, he could have been a contender on Gordon Ramsay’s “Hell’s Kitchen,” he was that good. But he was not prepared for a boys’ weekend of “let’s get drunk.”
Well, we were told that “Pat” (the chef) had selected a special meal for us. Starting with some kind of squash soup, we’d move on to some kind of beef with some kind of potatoes, and some kind of vegetables. Note that when I say “some kind of,” I mean “some kind of French name that implies something has been done outside of the normal, ‘grill the steak, bake the potatoes, boil the peas.’” Which would have suited us just fine.
Well, a meal like that takes some time to prepare, and the boys were getting hungry. Randy assured us that Pat was working on the steak sauce au poivre. Or something. Anyway, “He went to six different stores before he found just the right capers for the sauce,” said Randy. “It’ll be worth waiting for.”
“Who the fuck cares about capers?” one of the boys asked. “We’re hungry! Capers, whatever the hell they are or not, fercrissake, feed us!” Then an minute later, “Anybody sober enough to drive to Burger King or Pizza Hut in the nearby town? Let’s get some real food.”
I could go on, and there is more to the story, but anytime I hear about capers, I think of this story. If you go to six different places in search of capers with which you plan to feed a bunch of undergrad drunks in a fine-dining meal—maybe you shouldn’t even bother.
One consideration here is that this is very bad news for the restaurant.
The restaurant has a fixed number of opportunties per night to make money by serving food to paying customers. You’ve reserved one of those opportunities for yourself, meaning that they didn’t give it to someone else. Teh restaurant has a reasonable expectation that your booking will result in them being paid. Especially if they hold up tehir end of the bargain, which is to provide the kind of food they do. If you walk out, you leave them in the positoin of having lost a potential paying table - a table which if you had not booked they could most likely have given to someone else who would eat their food and pay for it.
Now this isn’t a legal obligation. You can in fact just walk. But no-shows (which is waht this effectively is) are extremely damaging for restaurants. There was an unpleasant trend a few years ago of wealthy people booking 5 or 6 different high end restaurants for lunch, then deciding on teh day what they fancied and simply no-showing at the others. It came close to putting some places out fo business. (And it’s high end tasting menu places that suffered most from this, because their model is small volume, high price so each lost table is a substantial chunk fo their expected income).
Restaurants fought back by requiring hefty deposits on table bookings, which they didn’t want to do but it was the only way to make sure people showed up for their booking. The hypothetical doesn’t say if tehre’s a deposit behind this, but in either case I would be very reluctant to walk out on a booking because I know it’s shafting the restaurant, who in this case haven’t done anything wrong.
My wife is like you. The list of things she can eat is quite short, and the criteria are not necessarily obvious. For an easy example, she can only eat “wet things” that she herself has prepared. She will only eat soup or beans she has made.
She can not have very fatty foods either and will skip the sauces and such so that she doesn’t have a night of intestinal distress.
This aspect of her doesn’t make her a lesser person, but it does mean that I wouldn’t get myself into the position of the OP because I would know beforehand that odds were strong that she would find nothing appealing on the menu.
The problem is that she doesn’t necessary know how to articulate what is “good” and what isn’t. The wet/dry thing is just an example, but texture and ingredients play a role too.
ETA: I realized that travel by train fits the OP description very well. They have a limited number of things they can prepare in a swaying rumbling train (e.g. the fryer would just slop grease all over), and plenty of passengers to feed, so you get a meal time, often late in the evening, and when you show up you sit with strangers and choose from a very skimpy menu. My wife suffered on that trip!
I’ve been to many exquisite beer/food pairings. Five or six small courses, each served with 6-8 ounces of a paired beer. Not cheap events.
Each course is a surprise. The brewer or brewer rep might have a few words about the beer, and the chef says a thing or two about the food course.
I’ve never skipped a course, nor a beer. But I saw plenty of people who totally skipped a course, or just had a bite. I especially enjoyed one evening where one of the courses was a pâté. The three people at my table offered me theirs and I scarfed them all down.
The comic Jeff Foxworthy does a bit that’s a variation on this. A group of guys goes hunting together regularly. Somehow a gay acquaintance of theirs is invited along and decides to play “gourmet chef” to the group. I won’t wreck the punchline, but it was the same general ideas as yours.
That was my reaction. The premise and set-up aren’t impossible but they’re threading a needle in an unrealistic way. So we all get to yak about anything and everything related to eating out.
The OP’s response is unhelpful; I don’t know what they expected, but evidently we’re not giving it to them. Oh well.
I find the idea of a non-picky eater who’s acquainted with higher-end dining looking at a high-end menu and nothing is “remotely appealing” to be pretty implausible. Maybe none is exactly what you’d order if you were writing the menu from scratch, but that’s not the question.
If the underlying issue is “For OMG $200 per person it better be my Platonic Ideal of food”, well the problem is you’re letting the dollars drive your palate. You’d be happier at a $150 or $100/person place where that thought wouldn’t be preventing you from finding something enjoyable among the varied options.
Another thought … Unless the person is just in a mood today for whatever reason and wouldn’t like anything or anywhere or any one. I’ve certainly been in those sorts of pissy moods. But if so, we would not have left the house. I’d have been adult enough to put the kibosh on the plans early. A much milder spot on that same spectrum, I’m sure we’ve all had occasions where we were the guest of honor and somehow everyone else is much more enthusiastic about making a big too-doo over [whatever] than you are. It does feel like a vexing performance where the one thing you wish they’d all do is simply skip it, or at least tone it down. But, you soldier on for appearances’ sake. Such is life as an adult.
It’s not my job to worry about stiffing the restaurant. I don’t make multiple reservations intending to no-show all but one. But once in awhile stuff happens. They have their economics figured out, including some amount of no-shows. If there’s a charge, there’s a charge. Paying that for not eating is a risk customers run whenever they sign up there. Catch COVID, crash the car coming home from work, whatever? That money is gone. OK.
If you want just answers:
No, nothing like this has ever happened to me. But - of your options,
(1) is just plain bad manners. You don’t ask that sort of thing in a good restaurant.
(2) seems like a good way to spoil the birthday.
(3) is really the only way to go; try to do it gracefully.
(4) again is bad manners. Give the table back to the restaurant so they can use it.
I’m always embarrassed to remember the time many years ago that my husband and I went to a fancy restaurant in New York and had to ask the waiter, “What are Harry-caught vertz?” He was nice about it but I’m sure he giggled about it in the kitchen.
My then wife and I went out to dinner with a good friend of ours and her new boyfriend. He really wanted to impress us so he chose a nice place (it was very good, we’d been there before). He insisted on choosing the wine but the poor guy didn’t know shit about wine and didn’t want to admit it. He chose a nice Merlot but pronounced it “merlott”. The waitstaff and the three of us suppressed smiles. Having nothing to do with that, they broke up shortly thereafter but he’ll forever be known as Merlott to us.
