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.

That's a definite 'always look on the bright side!' Attitude you have there @gemma19846 , I like it!

Not me, but inkeeping with the 'theme' of this thread, my Dad often reiterates that when he was young him and his cousins would often come home drunk and stay at one of their Aunt's houses as she was more easy going about young blokes turning up drunk. He was disorientated once in the night, forgot where the bathroom was in his drunk state and only in the morning realised he'd weed in the 'tanks' (I think just some sort of vessels on the floor) where his uncle and aunt made 'jelly' (is it brawn?)so everyone had to eat it the next day and not say anything

Meal at home (retirement village) the other day. "Open steak sandwich" they called it. Slice of bread with a small piece of steak sitting on it and slices of beetroot and tomato on top. Godawful coleslaw sort of stuff drowned in mayonnaise, limp slice of lettuce and "chips" that looked like pieces of boiled potato, complete with skin. Worse, this was cooked and put in the fridge for reheating (they serve the main meal at lunchtime, so the majority of us who don't eat a cooked meal then have to microwave it later). This dire effort had absolutely no flavour. I don't know what the cook was doing, he can make very nice stuff, but sometimes ... eww! There have been a few I've had to bin because they're too bloody spicy or peppery. Apart from having GERD, I have no tolerance for having my mouth burned and don't consider masochism should be part of eating!

@Catsmere, I once had an evening meal at my mum's care home, described as "cheese pie". It was mashed potato with grated cheese on top .

@Bandolina

Apologies if this was asked before, but they didn't offer you some yoghurt?!
I only went to a university friend's house once - an Indian family - and they had a small bowl of yoghurt ready for me from the start.

Gawd!!!

I was with my mum and she'd bought a Jamie Oliver ready meal with black daal. It looked like poo. And smelled little better. We didn't eat it.

I made one of my own worst meals though it was just bland and boring - we were going away and I needed to use up some stuff so had plain pasta with the remains of a bag of rocket salad. It wasn't my finest culinary hour.

Christmas dinner. The meal itself was allergen safe, but the host served the entire meal atop platters decorated with one of my main allergens as a garnish. It looked wonderfully festive to everyone else.

my meal ended up consisting of one roll and one very tiny scoop of vegetables.

I was starving by the time we got home. Thankfully I had sandwich supplies at the ready just in case.

My DIL cooked us Christmas dinner one year and seemed to have taken on board about me being vegan. Trouble was she then went and poured Bisto gravy all over it with the meat juices included in it!

@Ponderingwindow I'd have been so annoyed! What a waste of food, too!

In the early days of my being vegan I remember going to a restaurant after telephioning and been assured that I could have a pizza/pasta dish without cheese which I was happy with.

However when I got there they said all their pasta was fresh (so contained eggs) and the pizza bases contained milk and some other animal deriviative too!
I ended up with a very small jacket potato and a bowl of olives. There was oil and vinegar on the table so I mushed it into the jacket potato and picked at the olives-I like olives but they're not exactly a meal are they? Plus wine was flowing. I had to go home straight after the meal while everyone moved on to a bar for more drinks as I was borderline sloshed and starving!

A Christmas meal at a hotel restaurant, one of those £30+ jobbies with a disco. Being vegetarian there was no starter and the main was pasta. I complained the next day and they couldn't have been less interested.

@Happyasapiginmuck1 those are some of the 'traditional worst' situations I find.

I once refused to go to a works do that was similar although I think it was more than £30, and all drinks included. The options for food, although I don't remember them, sounded dire.
I told management I wasn't going, and they couldn't sell it to me even with free drinks. I predicted that it would be one of those affairs where it was table service and you ended up with 2-3 drinks all night, no sharing a bottle of wine etc because the service was so slow.

I met them all for drinks afterwards, they were all rather annoyed because it turned out I was right. I wish I wasn't, glad I didn't go but a total rip off for my colleagues.

I once had a dry jacket potato with a tiny bit of very sad looking plain salad. That was literally the only vegan option. Needless to say it was shite!

We went on holiday to northern croatia. We usually like to eat at local restaurants when we are abroad and try the local food.
I ordered what I thought was going to be chicken in a creamy sauce with pasta.
What arrived was that exactly, except that ALL the parts of the chicken were in the suace! Bones, feet, beaks, unidentified bits, the lot. Ugh!

I’m a vegetarian and my birthday is on bonfire night, My MIL was hosting a party I really didn’t want to go I wanted to have a nice dinner at a restaurant but my DH was dead set on going! My MIL served chilli in jacket potatoes but didn’t buy anything I could eat so for my birthday I had a dry jacket potato with out butter. I’ve never been so disappointed ☹️

@Favouritefruits dry jacket potatoes seem to be a running theme for vegetarians and vegans! I hate it so much!

The worst meal I ever had was from MIL (not my MIL then but first time I had stayed at her house). It was so traumatic even writing about it makes me feel ill.

I was desperate to make a good impression. She asked if I'd like to stay for Sunday roast, I foolishly imagined my DM's excellent Sunday roast and said yes.

She spent the whole afternoon asking me if I ate every thing she was serving - do you like pork, do you like carrots, do you like broccoli etc etc. So far so good.

Then the meal actually arrived.

It wasn't a joint of pork, it was thin slices that appeared to have been in the oven for several weeks. The veg had clearly gone on at the same time as the broccoli was basically liquid.

Worst of all, the one item she hadn't checked with me - she had drowned everything in so much gravy (Bisto) that it was hard to carry the plate without it dripping. I have a strong visceral aversion to gravy (both DH and I are ASD with strong food aversions but I didn't know this then).

I got through the meal by a mixture of suddenly making out I wasn't hungry, resorting to hiding stuff under my cutlery like I was back in school, and not making eye contact with anyone while trying not to retch. Meanwhile FIL-to-be went on and on about the lovely gravy.

Then for dessert there was custard. I feel the same way about custard as gravy but this time managed to serve it myself. One drop to show willing.

Afterwards I burst into tears and told DH-to-be the awfulness of it and how I couldn't go through it again. Luckily he agreed and we have never eaten anything MIL has cooked again.

Vegetable lasagne. It consisted of a small dish of broccoli florets in a tomato sauce. Covered in a layer of pasta/bechamel sauce. There were no other vegetables and no layers.

Well I don't have any dietary restrictions and will eat anything. However I struggled to force down my mil’s offerings, she was literally the worst cook in the world.
One of her ‘best’ meals was salmon and salad. So a bit of limp lettuce, half a tomato and a few carrot shavings. Add a frozen salmon portion and put the whole plate in the microwave.
Half defrosted salmon with warm lettuce yum.

I met family at a Hungry Horse for lunch recently. Christ it was awful. Pretty much everything on the menu is 2000 calories of fried crap. I ended up choosing the veggie lasagne. A few veg in passata and then cooked until it was a shrivelled and dried up lump.

Am vegetarian so asked for only veggie option, stuffed peppers.Half a raw green pepper with a spoonful of boiled white rice inside. No salad or anything else. Wasn't cheap either but my friend was paying so didn't want to kick off. Delighted a few months later when I saw it had gone bust!

Sausage crumble.

Two words that should never go together.

@KievLoverTwo I'm late to this thread but I have a gf onion gravy recipe that I use all the time and it's lovely, especially with sausages/gf toad in the hole.
Fry 3 sliced onions until soft and starting to brown
Sprinkle over 1 dessert spoon of caster sugar and 1tsp chopped thyme and continue to cook until caramelised
Add 1tbsp cornflour or gf flour (plain or self raising, makes no difference)
Cook until a thick paste forms
Add 400-500ml of stock (I use Knorr beef stock pot but any gf stock will do)
Bring to boil, then simmer until thick

If you don't want onion gravy, you can use finely chopped veg and strain out at the end. You can also make batches of the onions and freeze them before the flour stage to make quick gravy in the future

I was once given an avocado sliced up and placed on 3 spinach leaves as a "working lunch". All the non-vegans had sandwiches/wraps, etc. I have no issues with gluten and I'm not sure why my avocado couldn't have had a wrap or something with it!

Haggis on the isle of skye

Fils prawn aspic

I once made a broccoli and barley soup, fuck it was rank