I don’t understand this at all.
You are very defensive about any comments or people suggesting what are likely scenarios but posted expecting people to agree your friend is cheap.
I agree some people are commenting wrongly about things like the expectation of presents when you have clarified none are expected but there are a lot of comments on the thread. You seem to want to police people’s comments so that they agree there should be food and that’s it, in that case what’s the point of starting a thread when you just wanted everyone to agree with you and no further discussion? You might as well have just asked people to vote and not comment.
It is a strange thing to do to organise a birthday celebration starting in the afternoon and carrying on for hours and not providing food - especially when people are drinking, you agree with this but are defending the suggestion people order bar meals randomly which pretty much everyone on this thread has agreed isn’t likely to work.
If people arrive at 4 knowing they won’t be fed they will likely have eaten lunch late, if they start to feel hungry and 20 people order bar meals between 5 and 6 then it’s weird to have a half a group eating with meals coming out randomly.
If they are still eating in the function room at 6 what happens? Who is responsible for taking decorations down? Are you just asked to leave the room with people halfway through their gammon and chips or sticky toffee pudding?
A large group then doing a pub crawl with people randomly ordering meals in different pubs is chaotic, what happens if some people are eating, some are ordering and some are waiting for food? Do the group stay together or is it just people spread out around different pubs eating their own meals? There isn’t any sense of celebration to this. I agree with pp that a lot of people will leave the function room at 6 and decide to go to get food, it’s possible that a group might end up splitting off and going for a meal together.
If I had been drinking and heard Dave and Sally saying they are starving and going for a Chinese I’d prefer to go and sit and have a meal together rather then sit in a pub eating fish and chips on my own surrounded by the rest of the group drinking, and someone is bound to start eating the chips which incites pure rage in some people 😂.
If you don’t mind the idea of people ordering their own meals (and you have defended the idea several times) then I guess that’s what you’ll have to do. To the majority of people on this thread it is a strange arrangement and doesn’t sound like a good night, it sounds like a shambles and you might not agree but I think people will split up from the main group to eat together.
We of course could all be completely wrong and people might be perfectly happy to sit and eat a meal without worrying that they will be separated from the group and it’ll work out fine. I have been in a similar situation once when we went for a group meal to a lovely pub in the lakes for my mums birthday.
They lost our booking the chef wasn’t prepared for a large group when we had preordered. It took ages for food to come out and the people who had their meals first were eating surrounded by the rest of the group hovering like hungry seagulls. By the time the last persons meal had come out the first group had left with others impatiently waiting for them to finish, some people didn’t even bother waiting to order and went elsewhere for food.
It was supposed to be a big celebration meal followed by a pub crawl round Windermere and Bowness but out of 30 people there were 7 left in the end and it was a big disappointment.
If you can talk to your friend and suggest that she puts on some kind of food and snacks then it might make the night so much better, if she doesn’t listen then you know how not to throw a bash! 😂.