Myself and a group of friends go on an annual city break, usually to somewhere in eastern europe, and this year’s trip is coming up. Two of our number are vegetarian, and they tend to dominate the decision making when it comes to where we eat. My issue is that this is often at the expense of ambiance and so on - what usually happens is we traipse around, they will look at the menus and reject anywhere that doesn’t have about half a dozen veggie choices, even if it looks really nice and there are one or two options they can go for. We often end up forsaking the most interesting restaurants for places that are mediocre but have numerous veggie options. Worse, they make a beeline for vegetarian or vegan restaurants, the argument being that the rest of us (who are the majority) can eat anything on the menu whereas it doesn’t work the other way round.
I do appreciate that they have less choice, but when visiting a new city I do feel a bit annoyed at not being able to go to places with, say, a great atmosphere, reputation, view, etc etc because the priority is always whether the veggie menu is extensive.
In anticipation of this year’s trip I’ve sent round a list of suggestions of places that are meant to be good and that are ‘vegetarian friendly’ in the hope that we choose restaurants that suit everyone, not just them. But my message has been met with ‘I’m sure we’ll be fine, there are bound to be plenty of places’ which makes me think we’ll end up doing the same old thing of traipsing round. I’ve jokingly said that I don’t want to go to any vegan places, but actually I’m not joking, I really don’t want to! Am I being unreasonable?