What's the worst meal you've been served? Especially but not limited to those with restricted diets?

[CrapGoat]

I mean if you're coeliac/gluten free/vegan/allergies or anything like? But others as well.

I went to a well-known Fish and Chip restaurant with family recently.I cannot remember how the vegan option was described, but what I got was a small lasagne dish containing some gloopy tomato sauce, inset with three or 4 slimy aubergine slices. A side of new potatoes (about 6, which in fairness were at least quite nice).

Completely tasteless and I was straight in the cupboard for snacks when I got home as I was so hungry. Vegan doesn't equal-no appetite/doesn't like food/is happy with a tiny dish of slop.

I suppose I should be grateful for anything at all with that type of restaurant, but vegans/other people who don't eat certain things aren't hermits-we often go to places with/for other people!

T'was the best part of £20, too.

My old job was accompanying student tour groups, and in a hotel in Nuneaton the vegetarian dinner for me and the half dozen vegetarian students was a plate of boiled vegetables clearly left over from the wedding reception next door, with sparse squirts of a pale, viscid sauce horribly resembling semen on top. It was, allegedly, a stroganoff.

I’ve been to meals where the only allergen free option was plain white rice.

ive been to restaurants chosen by other people where I have been limited to a pile of iceberg lettuce with no dressing.

i have no dietary preferences like being vegetarian, only esoteric allergies.

Actually the worst was when I was in hospital for labour of DC2, in Ireland they keep you in a bit longer than the UK so it was dinner time and usually they were pretty good. My notes had "kiwi allergy: anaphylaxis" emblazoned in bright orange and I had a red allergy bracelet but somehow this hadn't been passed on to the food team. The catering staff brought me a fruit salad packed full of kiwis. I didn't dare even pick it up to bin it in case they'd touched the outside after handling the kiwis.

Oh gosh, I was also on a school trip to Italy about a decade ago. I wasn’t expecting a very high standard of cuisine and one of the meals we were served did in fact look like a Brillo pad of spinach. But I do remember in a single day we vegetarians were served both tomato-ish pasta for the starter and main meal and on another meal we got McDonald’s style cheese on top of a pile of cheese.

A lot of places are really bad at cooking many types of meat well. It's not always the thrill you imagine it to be!

@Ponderingwindow my sister had very strong allergies to almost everything when little (very rare autoimmune disease) and one of the few things we could eat with her was plain white rice. When we lived in France abroad it was impossible to eat out because no matter how we tried to convey “no butter, absolutely none, we are not joking” they’d always bring it with bloody butter. They’d say “it doesn’t taste nice” and we’d do a facepalm.

I ordered a gluten free margarita pizza in Madrid & what I got was melted cheese over tomato sauce, that’s it! Turned out their idea of gluten free was to just remove the base & not replace it with anything 😂

Not a restaurant but I didn't specify it had to be a restaurant!
My ex wasn't a bad cook generally, but I did most of the cooking as I like to cook.

One day however I was a bit under the weather, burnt out, knackered and with a bad cold and I asked her if she'd make me something to eat. I'd not eaten more than a few morsels since a couple of days before and I was suddenly hungry. She was quite reluctant and seemed very put out that I'd asked this of her! But disappeared into the kitchen and came back a few minutes later with a plate containing a wrap.

Only thing is it fell open because she hadn't softened (warmed) the tortilla and it contained;

1 (microwaved) vegetarian sausage
1 (raw!) button mushroom
And that's it.
No sauce no dressing no nothing.
I was like 'FFS I'm not eating that!'
I did shift off the sofa and make myself something after that, talk about weaponised incompetence. Not just the realm of men!

@KievLoverTwo yeah I can imagine you don’t very often get the same meal twice when ordering the same thing in different restaurants

Oh and the funniest was on a long-haul Air Malaysia flight from KL to London Heathrow, I ticked "vegan" and when it came, the main course was a container of soggy lettuce with two slices of cucumber chopped on top. The pudding was an identical container of lettuce and cucumber. The yoghurt was also replaced with a third container of lettuce and cucumber. As it was a 17 hour flight, the second meal of the day (breakfast for everyone else) was three more containers of soggy lettuce and cucumber.

I took my chances with the vegetarian option on the way back, and most of it was fine anyway.

@DGHZ Yes I have the menu anxiety too! Especially when someone else chooses the place and I have to check if there's anything I can actually eat or not and then potentially have the conversation with the event organiser (usually MIL, who relishes in telling me all the things I can't eat at any given place).

In the post natal ward for a few days while DD was in neo natal. I can’t remember any specifics except the cold, rubbery toast, but, because I was visiting DD most of the time and my meals were taken to the ward I was being ‘treated’ in I ended up making my menu choices based on what would be vaguely edible after being sat waiting for me for ages. Was such a relief to get home to my mum’s home made beef casserole.

You end up quite often ordering 'safe' meals that it's hard to get wrong. It's quite boring really.

But it also feels like people don't put out very good menus anymore anyway. Maybe it's a cost thing.

I am still better off than vegetarians where a lot of places can't really be arsed though. I feel for you.

Not one of mine, but my stepdad was flying with mum from Ireland to Australia. He is diabetic and coeliac, so had made sure to order special meals. They never showed up, in either direction, someone else must have decided it looked like a better option than the alternative meal choices! He would have been in real trouble if my mum hadn't brought gluten free emergency rations.

The school canteen that decided coeliac meant needed vegan soya chunks with barley and wheat in the gravy, only to then hastily put out a plastic bowl of iceberg and half a tomato labelled 'wheat free' - forgetting to take the 'croutons' (stale bread) out of the bottom of the bowl first - were the notable ones.

At a wedding where everyone else had this afternoon tea with all sorts of tasty things. Mine came out 30 minutes after everyone else and was a very dry gf wrap with Lettuce and a slice of cheese. It was awful!
The caterers then told me the falafel later on was gf turns out it wasn't spent 3 hours of the wedding in agony hiding then went to bed!

My most notable one is a bowl of olives at a holiday park. The DC wanted to eat at the onsite pub/restaurant one night and i agreed. The gluten free offering was more or less non existent. They doubled up on the olives which were actually a starter as there was nothing else i could have.

Actually I think the worst thing I had was a mushroom risotto kind of thing from Waitrose vegan range- it tasted and smelt totally like sweaty socks- revolting!! I'm not even veggie /vegan but thought it looked quite nice

A salad starter in a restaurant in Krakow with a dressing that looked, smelled and tasted like semen. You know that slightly bitter taste. 😆I was convinced that it was and that there was some betting going on in the kitchens as to whether I was going to eat it and/or mention it. Well, thing was, I was with my mum and she’d got together with my dad at a young age and quite naiive really. I was trying to guess how the conversation would play out if I mentioned it:

”oh god, this dressing, I’m sure it’s……you know.”

”sure it’s what? You don’t like it? Is it off? is it too sharp? Here, let me taste it.”

”No, Mum, I don’t think you want to.”

”what do you mean? Just let me!” And in my head she’d get some on her fork, chew for a few seconds and then she’d screw her face up. And say “gosh, that’s…..er…..unusual…..”.

and then no more mention of it would be made because she would know that I knew she knew what semen tasted like. My dad’s semen. 🤮😆. I just didn’t want to hear all that!

so instead I just pulled a bit of a face, said “I’m not too keen on the dressing”, scraped off what I could, and carried on eating. And then the waiter came to take our plates (and I’m sure he was smirking) and asked how we liked it. And I said…..”it was nice, thanks”.

Greek island many years ago, as a vegetarian. I gave up asking for the vegetarian option, and stuck with greek salad. I asked if perhaps they could make a salad with some beans as I was sick of feta. They gave me chopped lettuce covered in cold tinned baked beans.

Oh and the range over the years of horrors that passed for vegetable lasagne in different places. I shudder at them all.

I once attended an expensive awards dinner at a posh hotel, and treated myself by staying two nights and making a weekend of it. The breakfast buffet had big buckets of yogurt and fruit topping on the self serve bar. At dinner that evening, the wheat-free dessert they served me was… a bowl of the same fruit topping from the breakfast buffet. My ticket had cost £120.

I lived for a time in the Middle East as a child. A colleague at my fathers work made a 'local' meal for us. Multiple dishes, sides and all sorts. 1 dish was goat, but it had been pounded until it was fine, threads of meat. It was like hair in a thick, gloopy sauce. 😮

I’m vegetarian.
Everywhere the option has always been risotto, either mushroom or squash. I hate it!
I did however go somewhere once and get served plain cooked pasta with cheese on. Really enjoyed it!

When I was vegetarian, I was sick of bad vegetarian lasagne as only option and one of reasons why I started eating more meat fish again, gradually... !