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

[IwishIwishIwish]

We had friends to dinner last night and despite feeling ill I did my best to do a good meal because my mum brought me up to always treat guests well however hard things may be otherwise.

It set me thinking about meals I've been invited to and then I remembered the horribly embarrassing meal we were invited to at a work colleagues of DP last year. I didn't really know them but we went along. On arrival we were served with a glass of ribena. Unusual I think to myself but I quite like ribena (dp hates it). We stood about politely drinking ribena then were told dinner was ready. In each place was a plate with a piece of toast (most of it cold) and in the middle a packet of tesco value pate not even opened and one knife. The 12 of us carefully shared it out. Hostess then produced an apple each cut into quarters with a slither of cheese followed up by a cup of tea or coffee and that was dinner (served with more ribena).

Maybe I'm just a horrible person but it has to be the worst dinner party I've ever been to! Socialising with friends was lovely but surely a dinner party is as much about the food as the socialising?

DP and I had brought a bottle of wine as had all the other invited couples but all of those were squirreled away by host and not seen again. I don't think they were short on money by the way though you can't always tell by looking so they may have been trying to make the best of a bad situation

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.)

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' .

"We called her Sooty" is just killing me

snow that's awful. But hilarious.

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.

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

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.

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!

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!

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.

'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.

We went to a bbq recently where our host produced one small packet of sausages. - Between us there were 3 adults and 4 children.

I also remember one years ago where the hostess insisted on getting up immediately and doing all the dishes. Sort of ruined the ambience.

When my daughter was 1 some friends of my husband invited us round for dinner. I booked a babysitter and was really looking forward to some civilised conversation that didn't revolve round small children, wasn't interrupted by having to deal with crying etc etc.

We got round there and after about 10 minutes a neighbour dropped the friends two children back from a swimming class. We had to wait around while they were fed some kind of nuggets and chips type dinner, and then a DVD was put on for them while our hosts began cooking for us. I was pretty hungry by the time food appeared, and everytime the longed for adult conversation seemed about to kick off one or other or both of the children of the house came in and started demanding their parents' attention. At no point did either of the parents say, 'Well actually we want to talk to Frau and Herr Moose. Please give us some space.' It ended up with the kids sitting on their parents' laps and/or clinging to them while directing the conversation.

The other thing I remember was dessert. The hostess said it was a special treat and it turned out to be Walls Chocolate and Mint Viennetta plus some Sainsbury's profiteroles. Herr and I can eat most things but both of us dislike the combination of chocolate and mint. I said I was so full after the delicious main course I could only manage a profiterole or two. So Herr looked daggers at me as he ploughed his way through a huge helping of Viennetta.

The friendship faded rather after that...

I have two which I can never decided which was worse.

One where the hosts decided not to bother cooking anything suitable for me (I have an allergy) as it would just be too difficult and instead presented me with a take away menu upon arrival and told me to order something.

The host was hungry and my takeaway was taking longer than anticipated so she decided to serve the food while I sat with an empty plate waiting for my takeaway.
When the take away man knocked at the door, the host answered and shouted "Eternal it's your take away"
Yes, I had to pay for the take away myself, and it was horrible.

The other dinner party was the one where we arrived to find the other guests waiting on the driveway, the host was not home. After 20 minutes we finally got hold of the host, she said she would be five minutes, she was 40.
When she finally arrived home she has bags of shopping, she ha obviously been shopping.
We had to wait over an hour and a half while she got her kids to bed, then she said she would start dinner.
She refused any help and banned us from the kitchen, so we just all set there, without drinks chatting.
30 minutes later she appeared out of the kitchen with two bags of tortillas and a jar of salsa, which we devoured as we were starving.
Another 30 minutes later she reappeared with plates of sausage rolls, savoury eggs, cheese sandwiches, cocktail sausages and crisps.
One of the other guests joked that it was like a party buffet, and the host was very offended and sulked in the bathroom for an hour.
When she came out she said she was shocked at our reaction to her food as she always had such good compliments about her dinner parties.

She then announced that a program she wanted to watch was starting soon so we could either watch it with her "in silence" or go home, we all chose to go home.

God, you couldn't make it up, could you?
Makes come dine with me seem dull.
Brilliant.

We called her Sooty

ROFL

I was at a family dinner party around Christmas time when I was 17 or 18. I was categorised as a child and made to sit in the living room with my very much younger cousins during dinner as "there isn't room for you at the table".

Between starter and mains I was dragged in to the dining room and told to "sing 'Silent Night' for the adults". I said I didn't want to sing. I was told I was spoiling the evening. Under duress, cheeks burning scarlet with embarrassment, I sang. Then I was sent back to eat with the children.

Some of these are awful. Were did these hosts and hostesses go to finishing school (I need to cross it off hte list of options for DD and DS )

Guests being asked to pay for their dinner, take aways at different times to the main food for everyone else (then being asked to pay) you just couldn't make this stuff up

Oh just realised I was also the hostess of a terrible dinner party! You'll all let me off though... I think. We had ambitiously invited some friends round for dinner when my pfb was six weeks out. It went quite well but after the main but before the pudding my dd woke up and I had to go upstairs to comfort her. My equally sleep deprived DH followed me up to help and we ended up cuddling dd on the bed. The next thing I know it's morning, and our guests have all left! I can't even remember if they served themselves pudding now!

Though we're not religious, STBXH and I became friends with the local vicar and his wife. I became good friends with the vicar- we both enjoy creative writing, and used to swap work, compare etc.
Anyway. We had them over one night for dinner. In front of his DW and my STBXH, he handed me a folded up piece of paper and said "I really wouldn't read it in front of anyone else." Obv, this made the others keen to know what it was.
So I went into the other room and skim-read it. It detailed a dream he had had about reaching into a woman's fanny and pulling stuff out!

The oysters were impeccably timed that evening.

Tiger I think I'd have found that funny not bad. I mean very ambitious to host a dinner party with a six week old, sounds to me like you did quite well!

Reading this I'm not sure whether I'm glad or not about never going to a dinner party.

I feel like I need one of these experiences

Thank you scaredycat