Posted by Ask a Manager
https://www.askamanager.org/2025/10/the-mistaken-identity-the-electric-bagpipe-machine-and-other-work-restaurant-meals-gone-wrong.html
https://www.askamanager.org/?p=33921
Earlier this month we talked about work restaurant meals gone wrong, and here are 12 of my favorite stories you shared.
1. The mistaken identity
I (F) was in my mid-30s and traveling to work with a client. He had set up a dinner that should have included five or six of us on the project. Everyone backed out except me, which is how I found myself at a cozy, fireside table for two at a dark but excellent Boston restaurant, drinking a glass of champagne. (I was in my bubbles era…) And who should happen to be dining there but his wife’s cousin, who barged up to the table wanting to know why he was sipping bubbly with me rather than hanging out at home with his extremely pregnant wife. Awkward doesn’t even begin to describe it.
2. The tomato sauce
I once worked at an English language school. The owner was from Brazil and hired a Brazilian woman she knew to cook for the faculty and staff every day. It was mostly a way to pay someone in her community, but the woman always made phenomenal food.
At this stage in my life, I knew next to nothing about Brazilian culture or food. On my second or third day, I went into the breakroom and saw a crockpot of what looked like tomato soup next to some lovely, inviting rolls of fresh bread. I excitedly ladled some of the crockpot contents into a bowl, grabbed a spoon, and sat down with some of my new coworkers (who had just finished eating). I was chattering away, eating my lunch by the spoonful and occasionally dipping in pieces of bread. I noticed that my coworkers were growing silent and some were looking at me a bit awkwardly.
Finally, one of them turned to our cook and said, “Ana, this is so phenomenal, I think I’m going to get seconds!” She then went over to the crockpot … and I realized, to my utter horror, that the crockpot contained meatballs in tomato sauce and the rolls were for making meatball subs. And I had just spent the past 15 minutes sitting there eating tomato sauce with a spoon like a deranged person.
3. The Arnold Palmers
A new salesperson at my husband’s office took a client to lunch. The client ordered an Arnold Palmer to drink. Thinking he should match the energy of the client, the salesperson ordered a Red Bull and vodka. Every time the client got a fresh drink, so did the salesperson. When asked why he was inebriated after a work lunch, he explained the situation to my husband, who in turn explained to him what an Arnold Palmer was. (For those who don’t know, it’s half lemonade and half iced tea.) Lesson learned. Not sure if he got the account, but he certainly made an impression!
4. The cheese bread
I worked for a shoestring budget faith-based nonprofit that decided to do a year-long competition where the prize was a paid meal at a Brazilian steakhouse. I went, but we did not get plus-one’s. My very pregnant wife was jealous because she loves the cheese bread they serve at Brazilian steakhouses. So I put two gallon-size plastic bags in my backpack, stuffed it under the table, and every time the server reloaded a bread basket, I dumped the whole thing into my bag. I came home a hero.
The dinner was also attended by two young right-out-of-college intern men who were sharing a crappy apartment and living off ramen because they made so little. I have never seen two people absolutely gorge like those two did. I think they were getting their calories for the next two weeks.
5. The electric bagpipe machine
At a farewell dinner for a beloved colleague, my company was taking up about half the restaurant. The retired founder of our company decided it would be appropriate to bring out and start up his ELECTRIC BAGPIPE MACHINE, which is a box that basically sounds like a theramin in a kilt. Everyone in the restaurant, including most of us, thought some kind of deranged fire alarm was going off. He then proceeded to distribute handouts with lyrics of comic song he’d written to the tune of the Skye Boat Song about events on a work away-weekend from before most of us worked at the company (and before I was born), and expected us all to sing along with the machine. All the poor normal people who’d just wanted a nice restaurant dinner were staring at us, and I wanted to die.
6. The hibachi place
When I was a newly hired, my new group had a welcome lunch at a hibachi place, similar to Benihana, where the server cooks your food in front of you and puts on a show while doing so. The server called me “sexy lady” and squirted saki directly into people’s mouths. It was awkward and weird. Thankfully the group otherwise had normal standards of professionalism but it was a very weird first impression. That restaurant was to go to for group lunches for years.
7. The conversion
A business dinner actually made me vegetarian. Early in my career, I was connected via networking to a really nice and helpful woman who helped me get an internship at her company. The week before the internship started, she invited me out for drinks and sushi with a few coworkers and outgoing interns so I could hear more about the company and get a heard start on introductions. Super nice!
At the time, I didn’t eat fish (just because I didn’t like the taste) and when the waiter came around to me, I ordered the veggie roll. The woman who invited me turned excitedly to me and said, “Oh, are you a vegetarian too??” In my early-20s eagerness to please and desire to connect further with this really, really nice person, I panicked and said, “Yes!”
Not only was this a weird white lie, my internship at her company started the next week so I was also locking myself into living this lie by bringing vegetarian lunches and eating vegetarian at company events for at least the next four months. This actually turned out surprisingly fine – and I’ve now been vegetarian for eight years.
8. The small amount of tapas
I worked at a company that wanted to be a luxury fashion brand. They announced an all-staff party at a very posh tapas place on the beach, a few hours away from the office. The party was mandatory, so they rented buses to drive the entire company (70+ people) to the restaurant. We had an entire floor to ourselves, which included a beautiful view of the sun slowly setting over the ocean. Five hours of beachside views, appetizers, and quiet chat – what could go wrong?
Somehow, the plates of appetizers ordered ahead of time were not party-sized, but tapas-sized. So “a plate of mini eclairs” meant “two eclairs on a tiny plate.” The executive team ate all the appetizers before they got to anyone else before realizing that, no, that little plate with a single mini quiche on it was the only one coming out. The waitstaff also didn’t bring water to anyone except the executive team, because it was the restaurant’s policy that only diners got water and they were the only ones who ate.
People asked if they could order their own dishes and pay for them on their own, but were repeatedly told no by both the waitstaff and the head of HR. People started wandering around and attempting to leave to get food elsewhere but were dragged back by head of HR. We were all forced to sit at a single long table, without moving from our seats, without food or water, for the rest of the party.
At hour 4, the waitstaff brought out three small baskets of those dry boxed breadsticks. To their credit, all the managers at the section of the table I sat at made sure their staff ate breadsticks first before they did, so the managers ate nothing. Executive staff did get a single breadstick each. This was not considered sufficient enough dining for the waitstaff to bring us water.
I must have looked crazy to the guy who walked into the bathroom and saw me drinking from the bathroom sink before the bus ride.
No one spoke to each other on the hours-long bus ride home.
9. The boor
We were a very social office of about eight people and had two new starters in the same week. One of the new starters had made a couple of comments about being frugal before the meal, but none of us thought anything much about it.
Until it came to paying and leaving. Being the highest paid person there, after everyone had paid for what they had, I left a tip.
The new starter grabbed my arm with dismay and shock as we got up from the table to inform me that I’d left some money behind. I had to explain to a guy in his 30s what tipping was.
10. The rice
At my first day of my first adult job, my boss took me out to lunch. She was an extremely proper, middle-aged woman who I never saw laugh but she was still very kind. We went to a local Thai restaurant, and she asked me a question as I was eating. I finished my bite and began to respond, but a rogue piece of rice shot out of my mouth and ONTO HER PLATE. She blinked, remained unfazed, and then when she took her next bite just gently pushed my single piece of feral rice to the side of her plate.
11. The knife attack
When I worked in B2B services, we’d flown out to work directly with our most difficult client at their office for a few days, and they took us out for dinner at a fancy steakhouse. When the waiter brought us steak knives, he managed to fumble mine and drop it in such a way that it landed, point down, on my foot. I was wearing ballet flats so that part of my foot was completely unprotected and I straight up got shanked in the foot. It wasn’t so bad I needed urgent care or anything but it was bad enough that it was sore and needed to be kept covered for multiple days.
The waiter looked like he was about to throw up due to shame/horror so I reassured him that it was okay, but I was either too reassuring or not reassuring enough because after that he just kind of pretended it didn’t happen? I had to flag down a different waiter to ask for a bandaid so I didn’t bleed on the restaurant floor. I kind of expected them to at least comp my dessert or something, but nope! Which, no skin off my nose financially because the client was paying, but I did low key feel entitled to at least a scoop of ice cream in compensation for being stabbed in the foot.
12. The dark dinner
The owners of our franchise would throw a small holiday dinner for the higher level managers every Christmas (there was also a full staff one, a bit later). So, one year they decided to mix it up and, instead of the usual place, took us to an uptown steakhouse.
The food was fine, but the whole place was dark. We were at a table where you could see the person across and next to you, there was one candle for every two people (think 14 people), and that was it, with some light from the windows. People were pulling out their phones to read the menu, conversations were stilted because you couldn’t see the people at the ends of table, the waiters were carrying a small lamp on every tray, and the various appetizers that were ordered for the table were basically just put down in one place and no way to get it if it was more then a person down. It wasn’t a light outage of some kind, it was just they were used to two-people tables and kind of shoved our group into a section that was mainly used for displaying seasonal items through the windows.
The gifts that the owners handed out were passed out by an owner walking around the table to find the person it went to since they couldn’t see them from the head of the table.
Next year it was back at the usual cafe.
The post the mistaken identity, the electric bagpipe machine, and other work restaurant meals gone wrong appeared first on Ask a Manager.
https://www.askamanager.org/2025/10/the-mistaken-identity-the-electric-bagpipe-machine-and-other-work-restaurant-meals-gone-wrong.html
https://www.askamanager.org/?p=33921
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