Vegan given butter in restaurant

[Loveanavocado]

Went out for dinner this evening with dd’s.
dd1 has been a vegan for years. The rest of us are vegetarian, although I’m verging on veganism too tbh.

we went for dinner this evening, to our local. We often eat here and know the staff really well. So they know our dietary requirements.

this evening we ordered a dish and were all eating it. The waitress came over laughing and told us it had butter in it!!

dd1 was horrified and began to get upset. The waitress took the dish away and went to the kitchen. She returned and said “the kitchen are making another but they’ve got cross with me and asked why I told you it had butter in it!’

this has infuriated me!! Firstly given butter when told vegan. But even worse..told by the waitress that the kitchen would’ve not told the customer it had butter in it!!

AIBU?? What if dd had an allergy????

my dd2 has severe allergies (has had anaphylaxis a few times now!) so how am I ever going to trust them now??

I don’t know what to do! I don’t want to make a fuss as it’s our local in a very insular community

They should have been mortified by this, not laughing at it!

YANBU

They should have apologised and taken it seriously. Report them and name and shame.

This ignorant attitude towards your customers is the quickest way to ruin your business. There is a lot of trust being placed in restaurants hands when providing food and most restaurants generally can't afford to make a mistake here, not just on moral grounds but legal ones too. Natasha's Law and advertising standards etc exists for a reason. You would be well within your rights to report this restaurant OP.

I'm an enthusiastic omnivore, but I think the staff behaved terribly, and I would complain.

This is your regular place, and they've lost your trust. If they can't be trusted to take veganism seriously (and would normally hide an error) how can you believe they will respect your serious nut allergy?

The manager will want to know. If they're also cavalier about allergies, that could easily land her/him in a lot of trouble, apart from losing you as a customer.

@Loveanavocado report them to Environmental Health, citing how unacceptable this was due to allergen issues. I personally, wouldn't go back, despicable way to treat loyal or any customers.

YANBU.

They’re a restaurant. Their job is to give people the food they’ve asked for. They failed, they laughed, and would have been happy to cover it up. What a shite restaurant.

You didn't actually answer my question though - how is the dish presented on the menu?

If it is presented as vegan then they have actively contaminated the food and that would be worth a massive fuss as they had to go out of their way to change the dish from being "safe" to "contaminated" which is a massive deal and should definitely be complained about; if it is presented as vegetarian and they make a substitution to make it vegan then I would put it down to miscommunication in the kitchen (maybe the waitress didn't write down the vegan sub clearly or the chef didn't read the note re:vegan as they were too busy concentrating on the allergy note etc) that meant the wrong meal was served, however I would want to give feedback about how it was handled more as an "FYI you need to work on professionalism and how to appropriately respond to an inconvenient but not life threatening order fuck up" rather than as a big complaint.

I regularly eat vegan when out as I have a milk allergy.
Would be really ill if that happened, fucking disgusting if true (only saying if true as find it shocking anyone in the food industry would be so blase with known allergens!
They're lucky they didn't kill someone.
Absolutely complain in writing to someone higher up.

From your op where you said We often eat here and know the staff really well. So they know our dietary requirements. I thought you meant you were just expecting them to know, so apologies.

@Loveanavocado the waitress that laughed and said there was butter in there, did she take your order and bring you the food? It’s just odd she only mentioned the butter once you were actually eating. What was the dish?

I do think it’s unacceptable, as a vegetarian I would be horrified if I found out a dish had chicken stock in it or something. I once had a chef where I worked tell me to ‘just pick the ham out’ when he’d prepared staff lunches and hadn’t done me a veggie one! Some people just don’t care.

You don't advertise a dish as having no milk in it then go and put milk in it!
Dangerous.

It's not the same as disliking an ingredient! Being vegan is a choice, a stand against taking any animal products--a choice of compassion. It's not something taken lightly, and its not something the restaurant should have hidden or laughed at. This would have pissed me right off.

Someone I follow on instagram recently put up one of those question boxes on her stories asking what people thought about being asked if it was a preference or allergy, and the verdict was very much against it and people seemed to be furious.
Very odd!

I'd be wondering how many times they'd not told you about a mistake. I honestly wouldn't go there again.

I agree! And tofu is lovely ❤️

To be fair, as soon as they realised their mistake, they informed you. They didnt just let you carry on eating in ignorance.

YANBU.

Report them to your local authority.

It's not the same as disliking an ingredient! Being vegan is a choice, a stand against taking any animal products--a choice of compassion. It's not something taken lightly, and its not something the restaurant should have hidden or laughed at. This would have pissed me right off.

Yes. But honestly, once they'd used the butter the harm was done, if you see it as a supply and demand issue. Throwing that meal away doesn't make the butter disappear, it just wastes food.

And they did tell her as soon as they spotted it.

And they did tell her as soon as they spotted it.

The kitchen staff were annoyed that the waitress told them!

The kitchen staff would have let her carry on eating. The waitress realised and the kitchen staff gave her grief for not hiding the mistake.

But we don't actually know that it is advertised as a vegan dish and unless it was then the chef was doing nothing "wrong" by using butter in a vegetarian dish.

The OP says it's a "veggie pasta dish" but unless it's confirmed as being advertised as being vegan on the menu then there are many ways a dish can be meat free but still not be veggie/vegan and even if it is vegetarian then that doesn't mean it's vegan unless explicitly stated (eg fresh egg pasta with veggies in a butter or cream based sauce and cheese could be vegetarian but not vegan)

I wouldn’t go back. Staff shouldn’t laugh at customers about anything but this was really rude and inappropriate.

Leave a review online stating that they don’t respect vegans and are sloppy about ingredients - highly relevant to those with allergies.

I often wonder how vegans square the idea of “not taking any animal products” with the fact that growing vegetables are fertilised with the by-products of the meat industry? Either with manure, or with blood fish and bone which is the actual dead bodies of animals. That’s before you consider how many animals died from the pesticides they use on veg.

Sorry but they aren’t gonna be eating anything that costs no animal lives at all! I guess they know fuck all about farming which allows them to fool themselves into thinking that vegetables are vegan. But it’s silly really. Butter is the least of their problems, at least the milk cow isn’t dead.

Because people aren’t vegan because they’re allergic to all animal products.
Did the menu state that the dish was vegan?

The server shouldn’t have laughed - but maybe she was actually saying that the food didn’t really have butter in it which is why the kitchen staff said why did you tell her that. In which case I can understand the laughing - as in “oh silly me I said it had butter in, it didn’t but here’s a new one”

Get a grip!

Even if it was just on the waitress, the restaurant establishment stopped her.
As for the kitchen staff, they might just have been joking when they said that and not serious. You don't know. Certainly I could hear staff I've worked with saying that, but they wouldn't actually mean not to do anything about it.
However, ultimately, they were stopped before they had eaten too much.