So in my workplace we have a junior who is fully vegan, one time we went to a fancy noodle place and we each ordered our separate dishes. Like usual the same junior starts to ask the waitress what dishes doesn’t contain meat or eggs or milk or butter or cheese, what vegetables don’t grow in the ground etc., after about 10 minutes of back and forth (language differences) he settled on a plain noodle dish with veg broth and tap water.
Soon our dishes get served to us and the meal was amazing, conversation was enjoyable, everything goes smoothly until during mid meal, the junior starts sobbing uncontrollably for some reason. Naturally, all of us get concerned for him and our manager asks him what’s wrong, to which he points to the inner side of his bowl where there was a very tiny speck of meat, even I had to get pretty close to the bowl to see it. To be honest we didn’t know if it was meat or not unless we gave it a taste.
We really didn’t know how to calm him down so we asked the waitress to come over and explained to her the situation, then she went over to the kitchen and back to us to explain that there was no meat and only vegetables and flavouring was used to cook the broth and noodles.
Despite the explanation he keeps sobbing and we had to give him some kind of resolution, so one of our colleagues made up an excuse where that speck of meat got flicked over from his noodles by accident, and he calmed down slightly then proceeded to leave the restaurant. The remainder of the day was slightly awkward and he worked from home for a week after, I kinda felt bad for him to be honest.
Have you ever had to go to extreme lengths to respect a colleague’s dietary preferences or restrictions? What would you have done differently in this situation?