Tell me about the worst dinner party you've ever been to

'Friend of mine once went to a dinner party where, on sitting down at the table, the hostess announced it was time for everyone to chip in their contribution of £15 a head for the meal.

It was a pasta dish. Friends had taken 2 bottles of quite posh wine, as had the other guests. Nevertheless, they all paid up, mutely.

Weird.'

I'd have left and taken the wine back, too.

I haven't experienced anything on par with some of these. I did once go to a friends house for tea and was served 1 cubic centimetre of chicken, 1 leaf of iceberg lettuce and a tablespoon of rice.

I went to one lunch party hosted by a friend of a friend's wife. To this day I wonder if I inadvertently gate crashed or something. We arrived, bottle of champagne in hand, to an obviously wealthy household. We weren't offered anything to drink at all, throughout the entire meal (not even water... literally nothing). The meal was fine and the husband very jovial but the wife glared daggers at my friend and me throughout! Not quite sure what was going on and have never been able to find out tactfully!

One the hostess firmly refused our bottle of wine due to its (supermarket tho goodish) label and told us to take it home, at another the host fell in the pool but carried on regardless. Still another an acquaintance turned up 1 hour early, without apology and proceeded to bitch about the hosts behind their backs.. Loudly .. While they were rushing to prepare our dinner... People can be so strange!

Everytime we went to dh's brother's for "dinner"

He thought they were having mince and tatties, she thought spag bol. So we had hundreds of potatoes with a crappy tomato sauce and on my plate I got 1/2 the undissolved oxo cube while dh got the other half. Another time she made pasta bolognaise. The mince had a horrible sauce through it. She asked what her dh thought and he replied "it lacked tomatoes!" She replied "yes I didn't put tomatoes in, it was marscarpone sauce!"

We learned to eat before we go or else pick up a chippy on the way home.

I'm crying at Sooty and Minifingers' friend's chinless family

My friend's sister was hosting a bbq, just her, her DH and their dd, my friend, her DH and 2 dc, and the grandparents.

When my friend turned up she was charged for entry - £10 a head Apparently, the sister had decided, without telling anyone, that rather than asking people to bring something (coleslaw, dessert maybe) she'd rather just charge on the door for entry!! Her own family!!

I had a married couple as lodgers. The wife decided to throw a dinner party and invited a bunch of our mutual friends around. Three days before the date the husband had a brief bout of D&V. He recovered and was fine for the 48 hours before the dinner, so the party went ahead and the wife cooked a splendid roast beef. The guests arrived. We enjoyed drinks and starter with everyone except the wife being very jovial. She served the main course and we all tucked in with cries of appreciation for her cooking, whilst she sat silent, motionless and turned green. Suddenly she sprinted from the room to the loo and as we sat there - our cutlery hovering between plate and mouth - we heard her throwing up violently.

What is the etiquette in that situation? We were already half way through eating the food she'd prepared.

We poured ourselves more wine, and carried on eating regardless, occasionally calling through our approaval when we heard an entertainingly noisy bout of vomiting.

No one fell ill subsequently, and the rest of us had a lovely time, to the accompanying sounds of her illness.

snow that's awful. But hilarious.

"We called her Sooty" is just killing me

DH & I went to lunch at DH's oldest friends and wife's. Talk turned to wine and DH's friend said 'Where's that bottle of wine Mr. Snowgirl bought us for our engagement'. Wife said "we're saving that for when we have friends round' .

I have nothing to touch these (darn, my mates just aren't dinner party types), but I did go to a cringey one with my ex's family. Ex told me to dress up posh so I was in a nice dress and heels. Got there and told to remove shoes (fine), and we're all milling around in suits and cocktail dresses and, erm, bare feet or socks.

Food all served on fancy plates, cut-glass wineglasses, etc. etc., four courses. Embarrassingly shit school-dinner style food, stewed veg and packet gravy and so on, which everyone coos over and praises. So I am sitting there with a frozen grin on my face, when something starts sucking on my toes.

It was their dog.

I nearly screamed. I think was too young and daft to say 'your bloody dog is licking my bare feet', so sat through the rest of dinner putting up with intermittent dog toe-licking.

I thought I'd been extremely restrained but then ex's mum gave me a sour look at the end of the meal and told me pointedly that in their family, they appreciated good cooking and didn't make faces about it.

(My toes are twitching as I type this.)

Sorry to bring weddings into this, but worst food-related gathering I've attended was one. Evening meal consisted of sandwiches, after copious amounts of drink. There had been no lunch. Everyone was pished and ravenous. The vegetarian option included fish, which most of the veggies there didn't eat. My pal had to run outside to throw up as she'd had plenty to drink but pretty much nothing to eat all day, and the very strong smell of fish in the dining area got to her.

BlueStones a friend of mine had a mercifully brief relationship with a woman like that. She would eyeball everyone in the group, whisper her (usually unreasonable) demands and he would relay them to the assembled company. We called her Sooty.

Not really a dinner party, but in a restaurant one of the wives refused to speak to waiting staff. She whispered to her husband what she wanted (and she was darn picky) and he then had to repeat this to the staff. She wasn't shy, she just considered it uncouth to talk to "staff". Awful woman.

Screaming with laughter at Barbara, Harold and the 'so-called blue tits'!
Brilliant.

Went to dinner at the aunt of an Indian friend. I've always felt reasonably comfortable with hot food - lived in India for three years and Sri Lanka for a year and have eaten a lot of hot food, but this was on a different scale. The main dish was literally bristling with hundreds of tiny little chillies. I had three mouthfuls and found myself unable to speak or eat anything else or indeed do anything except impersonate a beetroot and cough feebly for the rest of the night. The aunt spent the whole evening giving me the evil eye for not eating much.

The most interesting bit of the night was looking at my friend's very weird relatives - there were a lot of first cousin marriages in her branch of the family, and at some point in 1973 chins had obviously become completely bred out of their physiology.

Friend of mine once went to a dinner party where, on sitting down at the table, the hostess announced it was time for everyone to chip in their contribution of £15 a head for the meal.

It was a pasta dish. Friends had taken 2 bottles of quite posh wine, as had the other guests. Nevertheless, they all paid up, mutely.

Weird.

Staying at MIL's naice country house. She invited her moderately elderly, posho chums round for a dinner party. They all got gently shitfaced apart from one apple cheeked old dear who got monumentally wankered and started a huge argument with one of the other guests about his blue tit nesting box, implying he was falsely grandstanding about how many were in it.
We all tried to defuse the mounting tension. At one point she screamed "shut the fuck up Barbara! I want to hear what Harold to say about his so-called blue tits." Then threw a bread roll at her.
Apparently this happens all the time and I, the supposedly young and broad minded attendee, was the only person who was mortified.
Then they all drove home, including fighty blue tit woman, the designated drivers all having had a modest one bottle of red each at least.
When I remonstrated I was mocked for my uppity urban ideas about not killing people/yourself.

fondantnancy that's weird. Lucky escape.

A long time ago when i was newly living with DH he invited some friends of his round for lunch, I don't know why I did it, but I decided to cook a ham which we had with baked potatoes. I knew the wife slightly and the husband I'd met at their wedding and I'd drunkenly said something ridiculously inappropriate to him about going on honeymoon, which caused him to look confused and terrified.

The ham was inedible, salty and semi raw in places and every potato was bad when they were opened, so we basically ate salad on a cold winters day.

They were so nice about it all but I still feel embarrassed.

Fondantnancy!

I thought you were going to say they handed the bowl round like a collection plate for guests to put money in. That would have been bad enough but what happened was even worse. By a mile.

OP yours is deeply weird. I'm sure there must've been a back story, although there is no real reason they couldn't have ordered a posh takeaway or even a pizza instead!

Mine was some new friends of DP's when we were new to the area. I can't remember how he'd met the guy now. There was a huge bowl full of change near the doorway. We didn't think anything of it and had a pretty nice evening until it was time to go. The hostess said something like "we like to check how honest our guests are," and she and her DH proceeded to empty the change bowl onto the living room floor and start counting the money while we sat, agog, wondering if this was some great gag, as the hostess was quite jovial about the whole thing.

Anyway. Turned out the bowl was 55p down. I swear it wasn't me and I'm pretty confident it wasn't DP. We were ushered out in very cool tones and never saw them again except once when I saw her in Sainsbo's and hid in the next aisle.