Friendship Fallouts·
THE MEAT DISH DIVIDE
A group dinner over vegetarian and meat dishes exposes awkward boundaries between a friend and a vegetarian dad, sparking a heated debate that jeopardizes their friendship.
Was that a fair boundary, or too late to say?
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The fight started over two meat dishes at a Chinese restaurant, and by the next day, a dinner invitation had turned into a friendship argument.
A 19-year-old friend had invited the poster's group out to eat so they could meet her dad. The plan sounded simple enough: the friend said, "she told us he would pay." There was one catch, though. "she and her dad are vegetarian."
So when the group sat down, the table split cleanly. The friend and her dad ordered vegetarian dishes. The rest of the group looked over the menu and ordered two meat dishes, because, as the poster put it, "No one likes just vegetables." In total, there were about six dishes on the table.
No one said anything at the restaurant. The dad paid for the meal. The group ate, finished up, and even took the leftover meat home.
The problem didn't show up until the next day.
Then the friend got upset and told the poster's group they had been rude. "Apparently it was rude to make her dad pay for something he couldnt eat and that we excluded her from the table," the poster wrote. The complaint was not about the whole meal, just the fact that two of the dishes were meat.
The poster pushed back right away. It was "2 dishes out of like 6," they said, and there had been plenty for the friend and her dad to eat. To the poster, it didn't seem like the kind of order that should have caused a scene.
In an edit, the argument got sharper.
The poster said they told the friend she should have warned them ahead of time that they could not have meat. The friend fired back that the poster should have known. "i should have known (literally how???" the poster wrote. Then the friend brought up something else: the poster is autistic, and the friend said, "she knows Im autistic and i dont just know stuff."
The friend also pointed to Thanksgiving, saying that when she had come over, she "couldnt eat anything." The poster said that wasn't true because there were sides.
From there, the poster's frustration only grew. They described the friend as "just being super childish" and said they were unsure whether they wanted to keep the friendship going.
What began as a dinner with a friend's dad ended with a question about two plates of meat, an unpaid-for meal that had already been eaten, and a friendship suddenly under strain.