Short backstory. I’m hosting a birthday party tonight, and have invited about 20 friends to dinner at a Thai restaurant followed by a private movie screening, all of which I’m paying for.
The thing that raised my eyebrow this morning, and prompts the subject line. One of the people coming posted on Facebook that they were off to a party tonight, but couldn’t eat anything, so she had better eat before she left. I know she has a couple of food issues but didn’t realise it was that bad. As an aside she didn’t contact us about this prior.
First up i suppose, do you think that was tactless? She knows she’s friends with my wife and I on Facebook, so we’re going to see the post.
Do I just have a tactless friend? Or does social media encourage thoughtless ‘sharing’? On Facebook at least your followers know who you are, but is there perhaps still some aspect of keyboard warrior syndrome?
I don’t know, perhaps it wasn’t really meant as a dig at you. Perhaps she truly feels like she has a hard time finding an allergen-free (or whatever the issue is) meal at a restaurant so challenging that it’s a major thing she likes to bitch about on Facebook. I suppose it would tend to get old after awhile if it really restricted your options.
If she REALLY didn’t care for your company, she would eat at home and not bother joining the group at the restaurant, right? She wants the pleasure of spending time with the group, but the dietary thing is too much of a PITA to deal with in a restaurant setting, so she eats something easy at home, rather than bore people or annoy the waitstaff with it?
I suppose it really depends on the delivery of the comments, but I wouldn’t be so fast to take it as an insult.
It may have been slightly thoughtless to post but she more than makes up for that slight by being willing to come out and enjoy time with you at the restaurant without badgering you to change the locale due to her issues.
From the sounds of your description of the post it was less a “well I guess I better eat before this party since I don’t have anything to eat there…AGAIN” and more like “I have a party to go to! but I can’t eat anything there so I should eat beforehand”
Voice inflection is hard to get online, I bet it was just a blabber being blabby on social media
If the lady has even 10 folks that can see her FB, then you can be reasonably assured she doesn’t audit each posting to ensure that each of the audience members will be individually pleased to read what’s written.
In her mind she’s speaking to an empty auditorium. Or at best one populated by a sympathetic audience of faceless generic guaranteed-friendly people.
One of whom happens to be you IRL.
I eat sorta fussy and I try real hard to *not *make it anyone else’s problem. Certainly there are folks who go out of their way *to *make it everybody else’s problem. You (the OP) probably knew before reading her FB post which category she belongs to.
This. Thai food is a minefield for people with tree nut or peanut allergies. Add in that it can be tough to explain “X food will make me extremely ill or kill me” to people who may not speak English as a first language…
She’s nice to not want to have to change the party venue.
So you have two options: pretend you didn’t see the post is one. The other is to give her a call and ask her about the post; if she has an allergy* that can be reasonably accommodated, call the restaurant, explain the situation, and ask the chef to come up with something that she can have. And ask the chef to be sure there’s no cross-contamination with other dishes.
Either one is ok from a manners perspective, I think.
*A **real **allergy; not one of the special snowflake dietary “problems” we talked about in another thread.
Nice? Nineteen people are going to enjoy a Thai meal, which she cannot eat and you think she is being nice by not insisting the venue be changed to one she prefers?
If I invite twenty people out for a meal and I’m picking up the check, then one person out of the twenty tells me they don’t/can’t eat that cuisine, well it just sorta sucks to be them. Right?
Or gluten, or citrus, or nightshades (tomatoes and peppers), or vegetarians who don’t do fish sauce, broth or seafood. (I’ve been with a vegetarian friend at many places, and Thai, Chinese and Korean are the worst. She’ll make her need for no meat perfectly clear, and end up with squid in a seafood broth seasoned with fish sauce and jellyfish tentacles. I’m not even making that up. Apparently the concept of what is and isn’t “meat” is not universal.)
I love love love Thai food. But it is a hard one for people with special dietary needs and/or strong preferences.
Hey, it’s all good. She’s taking responsibility for her own needs and not making it your problem. We should all be so lucky.
If she is the type who uses Facebook to document every single mundane activity she does, then I wouldn’t sweat it. In such a case, she’d be a chatty-cathy. They may say silly things, but they mean no harm (usually).
But can I just use this as an opportunity to express confusion over why someone would feel compelled to post their dietary schedule on their Facebook page? Is this common behavior?
And if anything could be considered rude here, it’s her talking about a party that only some people (presumably) are invited to.
Yes, I think most vegetarians do. Otherwise, she’d be a pescatarian.
Of course, I know this isn’t universal. That’s the point of my bringing it up.
But if you’re trying to find a loophole for the waitress and kitchen, let me elaborate. She said, “I don’t eat meat. No animals. No fish. Only vegetables. Does this soup have only vegetables?” This was not the first time it’s happened. She’s learned to be very explicit. Still doesn’t work well at Thai, Chinese or Korean restaurants.
Am vegetarian. Can confirm that vegetarians = “no animals. No, not even fish” and Pescetarian = “no meat EXCEPT fish”. It is not unusual for pescetarians to call themselves “vegetarian” because many people don’t know that pescetarian is a real word, and I think that’s a big part of where the problem comes from.
Personally, I find seafood disgusting and always did even before I became vegetarian, so I really wish that there was not this common belief that vegetarians like fish.
As for the OP’s issue, I personally would probably approach it by responding to the Facebook post saying something like, “I wish you had told us that you can’t eat at this restaurant. We want everyone to have a good time!” Perhaps then she would clarify her intention.
