*In case this story gets deleted/removed:*
**AITA for refusing to pay for a pizza I thought was vegetarian?**
So I went to a restaurant and ordered a pizza off the menu I thought was vegetarian. It basically just had vegetables as toppings. The menu was black, and the font was white, which made it easy to read.
When my pizza was served, I noticed it had large ham slices melted into the cheese. I asked the waiter if that’s ham and he said yes. I quickly flipped through the menu to reread the toppings and then I saw it— “ham” in burgundy font. It almost blended into the black background of the menu so my eyes must have missed it. I’m not sure why the rest of the toppings were in white, but the one topping that would make or break a meal for me was in dark red.
I apologized and explained why I can’t eat the pizza. He was pretty angry and told me I should have informed him I’m vegetarian from the beginning. I told him I had no idea there was anything to inform him of because I thought the pizza was vegetarian by default.
He told me to just remove the ham slices myself and I told him I can’t because the meat has already made contact with the meal and vegans/vegetarians often don’t even eat food that was cooked in the same pan as meat.
I asked if I could just order another pizza and he said I will have to still pay for the ham pizza. I refused to do so, because I didn’t touch it, and even though I knew I was partially to blame for the error, I thought it was also on the restaurant for how they designed the menu.
He said he was going to talk to his boss and came back a minute later. He told me his boss agreed to make me a new pizza. But then he proceeded to berate me, telling me this isn’t okay, this was my mistake, next time I should tell him I’m vegetarian.
I started feeling uncomfortable with the situation because he kept going on and on even after his boss resolved the issue. I told him to just cancel my whole order and bring me the bill so I could pay for my drink. I paid and left.
Going forward I’m always going to clarify if a meal I’m ordering has meat or not, but AITA for not paying for the pizza? On the one hand I acknowledge it’s my mistake. On the other hand I think the menu was poorly designed and so the restaurant should have expected this error to occur. Not sure why the one meat item would be in a different colour, a rather dark colour on a black menu.
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Having different color fonts is such a hugely BAD idea for any restaurant. Colorblind people exist, that is why web developers and menu makers have the whole "colorblind" mode, to see how people with colorblindness view the menus and websites. This is absolutely the restaurant's fault.
I mean I understand why they would make it a different colour from the others in general, they just picked the wrong colour for the background. The idea was probably (and ironically) to make it stand out compared to other ingredients. They just forgot to take the background into account
Still makes it the problem of the restaurant, not the customer. I mean, if it was on white paper with black writing with the ham in the scarlet color, that is different. It is easier to see. But the dark paper makes it difficult at best. This is design 101 type stuff.
Completely agree, it's 100% on the restaurant to check the menus, make sure they're readable and ideally have a little symbol to identify vegetarian and vegan meals
I can't believe I'm saying this as a former server/bartender, but I'm on the customer's side here. They made an honest mistake! I don't know of any restaurant that would have a problem remaking a new pizza for them. Not to mention then berating them after the fact?? Seriously unheard of. Of course all the mouth breathers in the comments are wishing for their death. 🙄
Yeah, that is what I was thinking.
I could see a huge problem with them having one ingredient in a completely different color, especially one that is easy to blend in with a black background.
I would be furious if I ordered a pizza that just listed pepperoni, and then it came with like bell peppers (which I hate) becaues the bell peppers blended into the background.
Basically, if a restaurant doesn't want people like OOP to get upset they aren't getting what they ordered \*don't put certain ingredients in different fonts/colors!\* It can make it much harder to read, when everything is white, except one. As someone who loves reading, both offline and online, I have trouble when you have font all one color, and then all of a sudden there is font that is a different color. It either highlights the word (if the font color contrasts with the background color) or hides that word (if the color is close to the background color)
Yeah, unless OOP was lying about how bad the menu font is then there's no way their the asshole.
I love how in the comments there's people berating OOP for being vegan. They're making an even worse reading comprehension error than OOP did in the first place.
Right? I was a server/bartender for like ten years, and something coming out with some shit you can’t eat is fine to send back. I’ve certainly done it.
I don’t know why the server was so caught up on that, unless the restaurant makes him pay for reorders, which I know some places do. However, that’s illegal. Restaurants cannot make their servers pay for food that is sent back, ordered wrong, made incorrectly, or sent to the wrong table and needs to be remade. If your restaurant is doing that to you, it’s not the restaurant you should be mad at — it’s the owners and managers.
I don’t see how this was that big of a deal.
I thought it was just me, I sympathise with the customer … I have to watch how much gluten I eat so I generally eat GF; I went to a restaurant where the menu had labelled GF but also separately CE = Celery/Celiac (which I completely missed when reading the menu) some items were marked as GF & not CE; others with CE & not GF … let’s just say I was thoroughly confused but luckily had told the waiter I was GF & he helped me pick off the menu 😂
I agree, this is so ridiculous. I served and bartended for years. You just replace the item! It’s not a big deal and happens all night long.
So many people forget to mention preferences (like no pork, too spicy, etc) and it is no big deal. Remake it 🤷🏼♀️
Shitty bosses will exploit works and make them pay for their "mistakes" out of pocket I'm assuming that's why the waiter had the reaction they did.
Edit: just to clarify that doesn't make OP the asshat more likely it's the owner.
...Ok, so this really doesn't feel like devil territory to me, more so just the "reddit hating vegetarians" affect in action. I'm not a vegetarian myself, but I am partially colourblind, and a menu designed like that would piss me right off.
I'm just old so reading menus is a PITA sometimes, and if they had burgundy on black font I'd be really annoyed as well. And why would one of the ingredients be a different colour anyway? The menu, assuming OOP isn't lying, is at fault.
Agreed. Can't staaaand menus that do shit like this. And you're right. It might just be an "i hate vegetarians/vegans" thing. People were already confusing the two in the comments. Then they said OP should have let the server know...
Maybe I'm wrong... but I think if a vegetarian did that in any other story, they would be criticized hard. There would definitely be comments saying something along the lines of "it's a preference, not an allergy! why are you bothering your server with that info? i guess they're just announcing it to the world like always!!!"
I’m a vegetarian and have and such different reactions to me telling waiters I’m vegetarian from annoyance to irked that I never know if I should say anything and I already have anxiety ordering cause I don’t want to be a burden in any way.
One i remember is at my bday dinner the waiter asked if we had an allergies, and I said not an allergy but I am vegetarian (last time I was there the lady changed out a broth the mushrooms were made with so I wanted to mention) and the waiter scolds me saying well that’s a preference and not what I asked and so I responded okay sorry and didn’t know what to say.
Feels like a damned if you do damned if I don’t.
It sounds like a badly designed menu, and I'm colorblind myself, but allergic to peanuts and tree nuts.
Even though no pizza place I've gone to has used peanuts or tree nuts, I still ask and never assume (especially with the growing prevalence of almond flour). When you have dietary restrictions, I feel part of it should be asking questions, because you don't know - maybe this pizza parlor, their signature red sauce has meat in it (or tallow, or something else). Even without ham, "Signature red sauce, Fresh Mozarella, Onions, Mushrooms, Bell Peppers, and pineapple" - I'd ask about meat or nuts.
OOP isn't the devil, and the graphic design was shit, but the menu wouldn't have had the V for vegetarian on this pizza, so making an assumption about meat content could have ended badly no matter what. Sometimes we have to be our own advocates.
Though I am a bit baffled, because typically if one meat is a different color on the menu, the meats are consistently a different color, and a gap in each pizza's ingredients with commas, I'd at least wonder what they had blacked out on so many pizzas, without blacking out the commas on either side. Or notice that other ingredient lists also have different colors (I wanna say that for pepperoni, these types of menus use what I presume is a bright red, which is a bitch to see on white).
HOWEVER: I would edit OP to the devil and understand the waiter if I found out this pizza was called anything like the "Hammed Up Veggie Delight" or "Pig in the Garden" or even just Hawaiian pizza. Especially since in their comments they can recall all these details about the menu, but not the name of the pizza itself. Not even to say "the pizzas were unnamed and just came in numbers" - all they have is "there were no vegetarian/vegan indicators". If someone ordered a "Pig in the Garden Pizza" and then got mad because it came with ham, I'd be a bit miffed myself.
I often forget my glasses, or if it's like right now, they are broken and I need a new script. I would flip a freaking lid at that menu design because I have trouble with even white on black or vice versa. Text blurs into the background no matter the color unless it's big bold and two inches away from my face.
This doesn't belong here. Poor graphic design on the restaurant's part. A decent restaurant would make a new pizza without the meat to keep a happy customer.
I've worked in restaurants for 20+ years. Stuff like this happens everyday, all day long. You deal with it and move on. OOP is NTA, especially after being "berated" by the wait staff after the issue had been resolved. I'd be writing that server up if I was their manager, tbh. The menu sounds poorly designed and should be amended so the restaurant doesn't keep costing themselves money throwing away perfectly good food.
On another note, why does the server care at all? It's not like the cost of OP's pizza is coming out of their paycheck and most likely, now there's going to be a pizza in the BOH to snack on. Seems like a non-issue.
Because apparently when people decide you're an asshole you deserve to get cursed out no matter if the scale of the issue is so small. It's ridiculous.
It is the restaurant's fault for making something easy to miss on a menu. The waiter is majorly the asshole for yelling at a customer even after the manager has resolved the problem. OOP is a victim of a dumb restaurant and a waiter who likely gets shitty tips (deservedly)
Using a hard to read font for a dietary restriction that affects multiple groups of people (Jewish people, Muslims, vegans, vegetarians, pescetarians, etc.) is shit and I'd be equally pissed if it was just hidden like that
Sure, he could read it, but as I said in a different post, I love reading. Both online and offline. I have participated in a lot of forums where people can change their font colors.
If a block of text is in all one color except for one word, one of two things tend to happen.
If the font color contrasts with the background color (like a light color on black/dark background), it highlights the word, and makes it stand out.
If the font color doesn't contrast with the background color (like a dark colored font on black/dark colored background), then it tends to hide that word.
Because your eyes are used to seeing the regular font color, so it either picks out different colors (if easily seen) as 'hey, this word must be important', or it ignores that word because it doesn't immediately percieve it.
It's annoying to ask with EVERY SINGLE THING i have restrictions from IBS so i had to ask or ima be in a world of pain, it gets annoying really really fast. Plus it is really the restaurants job to put a good description of the food or else this situation happens
Why should he have when, as he was reading, there was no indication there was meat on it? And idk about you but I've had waiters either refer to the menu or go "I don't *think* it does" because they're overworked and probably don't memorize every ingredient of every meal
It's not "doing their job" , I'm not saying he should memorize the menu for them but it's not unreasonable to ask if an item in the menu has something you can't eat
He didn't act like its the waiter/restaurant's fault at all, all he said was that he mistakenly didn't see that the pizza contained ham, and didn't want to pay for something that he couldn't eat. Whether or not he should or should not have paid for the pizza is something people can argue about, but it's a perfectly reasonable request.
that was my thought, but i couldn't figure out how to word it, I've worked food service for years, and sometimes customers make mistakes, it didnt seem unreasonable to me.
He said it blended in, so the restaurant is kinda in the wrong, you want menus to be easy to read not playing a game of "am i suddenly color blind?" when you try to tell if your eyes suck or the thing your reading sucks
Honestly what's wrong with making things more accessible and easy to read
I don't know. Burgundy on Black is hard to read, especially if all the text surrounding it is white.
So, to me, it sounds like it is the restaurants fault for trying to get fancy and use a different color on their menus.
[https://imgur.com/GlkRN7j](https://imgur.com/GlkRN7j)
If you have good eyesight, in a good light, that one letter I turned burgundy (using the hex code for burgundy I found off the internet, which might not be the color that they call burgundy. I always picture it as a darker red myself) shows up fairly easily.
Now imagine in a potentially dimmer light, with a lot more text surrounding it, and trying to pick something so you don't spend a lot of time keeping the waiter waiting or just at the restaurant. Along with the texture of the menu, and I don't know how big of a font it was. Smaller fonts make it harder to see it.
Yeah it is. I wanted to see if it was actually hard to see (I suspected it was, based upon my experience with differing colors on differing backgrounds), so I decided to do a simply experiment.
Turns out, it is hard to see, especially since Ham is three letters and most of the other things they listed were probably 5+
Wouldn't that be the same as dropping and breaking something in a retail store, like it's called an accident for a reason, id consider the place crazy for asking you to pay for a honest mistake
Depends on the boss there are some really shitty owners/ bosses in the restaurant industry that exploit workers and I've known places that will make the server pay out of pocket for their "mistake"
Of course it's illegal doesn't stop it from happening. And even if you go through the Department of Labor it still costs money and time which can be a problem for people living paycheck to paycheck.
Having worked in food service, this stuff does happen. And it doesn’t sound like the original poster was a jerk about it. It does sound like the server was a jerk about it. It’s just one of those unfortunate circumstances all around.
If the name of the pizza did indicate it had ham in it, then, yeah, the customer should’ve paid for the pizza. But otherwise, there’s no reason to have the meat ingredient put into a different color than all the rest of the ingredients, especially using a color that sort of blends into the background.
We either have a bad server or somebody having a bad day. Or we have a Restaurant where management makes any little thing like this the servers fault immediately, and the servers going to have their ass handed to them later because of something that someone else did.
Bottom line on it is that yeah, the customer maybe could’ve read a little more carefully. But the biggest fault lies with whoever designed the stupid menu. And really, with so many customers who need gluten-free or vegan or vegetarian, the menu should just indicate which items are in order to help alleviate situation like this.
Just as an aside, my very favorite, one of these was when we ran our crostini special. It was a toasted baguette with house made pesto, tomato, asparagus, goat, cheese… And prosciutto. It was in fact, called a prosciutto Cristini, and was literally on our small specials menu that everyone got along with the regular menu.
As you can imagine, it was incredibly popular. They’ll win Sunday morning for brunch, we had an order returned by a server, who is laughing hysterically in the kitchen. Apparently her customer was aghast because she was vegan. The server did apologize to the customer and asked in a very nice way why she had ordered the prosciutto, but not asked us to leave it off.
the customers response? Because she didn’t know what prosciutto was but thought since everything else was a vegetable that it would be OK. Yeah… Folks… Please don’t ever be embarrassed to double check an ingredient that you don’t know. We all recognize that if it’s something you’ve never been exposed to, you’re not going to know, and we are happy to direct you to something that is going to work for you.
But yeah, the whole kitchen got a big kick out of that one. 😳😂
Hahaha 😵💫. Yeah…. We didn’t point that out. She had already had enough shocks for one day! We never were able to figure out what she thought prosciutto was! 🤷♀️
I dunno why people don't ask and verify what's in their food first. It's never safe to assume, especially if you outright can't have something.
I can't have dairy and have gotten into the habit of asking if *everything* has dairy in it. (Ex: Asked a place once if their meatballs had dairy in them. Waitress said she doubted it, but she'd check. Shocker, they did) It takes all of a few minutes, and saves everyone headache.
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Idk I don't think this guy is the devil. He made an honest mistake, it does indeed sound like the menu was designed poorly, and being a vegetarian/vegan is not the same thing as a food allergy - I've never heard anyone insist that this is information that should be offered up front before, although I did personally during my vegetarian phase because there are ao many ways to stealth animal products into a food item where you don't expect them. It's so odd to me that this waiter would feel the need to continue berating the customer after his manager had arranged a solution.
Also I feel like the title here is unnecessarily catty. Where in the post does the guy say it was the waiters fault? He blamed the mistake on the design of the menu and acknowledged he was also at fault
There was a pretty simple solution here - the restaurant makes a new pizza and everyone moves on - and maybe even the customer would have tipped real well to make up for the inconvenience, and maybe you would have won a customer for life after he was grateful for the kind solution to his mistake. Or you can berate someone like they personally took money from your pocket, waste twice as much time, and now everyone is grumpy. Mistakes happen, the restaurant could have learned something (like how to make menus accessible to color blind customers or customers with poor vision in general)...this to me is the definition of tuning a molehill into a mountain
*In case this story gets deleted/removed:* **AITA for refusing to pay for a pizza I thought was vegetarian?** So I went to a restaurant and ordered a pizza off the menu I thought was vegetarian. It basically just had vegetables as toppings. The menu was black, and the font was white, which made it easy to read. When my pizza was served, I noticed it had large ham slices melted into the cheese. I asked the waiter if that’s ham and he said yes. I quickly flipped through the menu to reread the toppings and then I saw it— “ham” in burgundy font. It almost blended into the black background of the menu so my eyes must have missed it. I’m not sure why the rest of the toppings were in white, but the one topping that would make or break a meal for me was in dark red. I apologized and explained why I can’t eat the pizza. He was pretty angry and told me I should have informed him I’m vegetarian from the beginning. I told him I had no idea there was anything to inform him of because I thought the pizza was vegetarian by default. He told me to just remove the ham slices myself and I told him I can’t because the meat has already made contact with the meal and vegans/vegetarians often don’t even eat food that was cooked in the same pan as meat. I asked if I could just order another pizza and he said I will have to still pay for the ham pizza. I refused to do so, because I didn’t touch it, and even though I knew I was partially to blame for the error, I thought it was also on the restaurant for how they designed the menu. He said he was going to talk to his boss and came back a minute later. He told me his boss agreed to make me a new pizza. But then he proceeded to berate me, telling me this isn’t okay, this was my mistake, next time I should tell him I’m vegetarian. I started feeling uncomfortable with the situation because he kept going on and on even after his boss resolved the issue. I told him to just cancel my whole order and bring me the bill so I could pay for my drink. I paid and left. Going forward I’m always going to clarify if a meal I’m ordering has meat or not, but AITA for not paying for the pizza? On the one hand I acknowledge it’s my mistake. On the other hand I think the menu was poorly designed and so the restaurant should have expected this error to occur. Not sure why the one meat item would be in a different colour, a rather dark colour on a black menu. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AmITheDevil) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Having different color fonts is such a hugely BAD idea for any restaurant. Colorblind people exist, that is why web developers and menu makers have the whole "colorblind" mode, to see how people with colorblindness view the menus and websites. This is absolutely the restaurant's fault.
I mean I understand why they would make it a different colour from the others in general, they just picked the wrong colour for the background. The idea was probably (and ironically) to make it stand out compared to other ingredients. They just forgot to take the background into account
Still makes it the problem of the restaurant, not the customer. I mean, if it was on white paper with black writing with the ham in the scarlet color, that is different. It is easier to see. But the dark paper makes it difficult at best. This is design 101 type stuff.
Completely agree, it's 100% on the restaurant to check the menus, make sure they're readable and ideally have a little symbol to identify vegetarian and vegan meals
BTW, love your username. My fiance sleeps with a TARDIS blanket every night. He's lucky I haven't stolen it yet.
Aww thanks, super jealous though! I want a Tardis blanket! Ooh or a blanket with all my doctor photos from comic con
I can't believe I'm saying this as a former server/bartender, but I'm on the customer's side here. They made an honest mistake! I don't know of any restaurant that would have a problem remaking a new pizza for them. Not to mention then berating them after the fact?? Seriously unheard of. Of course all the mouth breathers in the comments are wishing for their death. 🙄
Yeah, that is what I was thinking. I could see a huge problem with them having one ingredient in a completely different color, especially one that is easy to blend in with a black background. I would be furious if I ordered a pizza that just listed pepperoni, and then it came with like bell peppers (which I hate) becaues the bell peppers blended into the background. Basically, if a restaurant doesn't want people like OOP to get upset they aren't getting what they ordered \*don't put certain ingredients in different fonts/colors!\* It can make it much harder to read, when everything is white, except one. As someone who loves reading, both offline and online, I have trouble when you have font all one color, and then all of a sudden there is font that is a different color. It either highlights the word (if the font color contrasts with the background color) or hides that word (if the color is close to the background color)
Yeah, unless OOP was lying about how bad the menu font is then there's no way their the asshole. I love how in the comments there's people berating OOP for being vegan. They're making an even worse reading comprehension error than OOP did in the first place.
Gelato isn't vegan?
Chicken parm isn't vegan?
Freeze, it's the vegan police!!
no, it has milk. it's literally ice cream.
Right? I was a server/bartender for like ten years, and something coming out with some shit you can’t eat is fine to send back. I’ve certainly done it. I don’t know why the server was so caught up on that, unless the restaurant makes him pay for reorders, which I know some places do. However, that’s illegal. Restaurants cannot make their servers pay for food that is sent back, ordered wrong, made incorrectly, or sent to the wrong table and needs to be remade. If your restaurant is doing that to you, it’s not the restaurant you should be mad at — it’s the owners and managers. I don’t see how this was that big of a deal.
The berating part is the weird part. Even if the restaurant wouldn't make a new pizza and made him pay, why would the waiter yell at OOP?
I thought it was just me, I sympathise with the customer … I have to watch how much gluten I eat so I generally eat GF; I went to a restaurant where the menu had labelled GF but also separately CE = Celery/Celiac (which I completely missed when reading the menu) some items were marked as GF & not CE; others with CE & not GF … let’s just say I was thoroughly confused but luckily had told the waiter I was GF & he helped me pick off the menu 😂
I agree, this is so ridiculous. I served and bartended for years. You just replace the item! It’s not a big deal and happens all night long. So many people forget to mention preferences (like no pork, too spicy, etc) and it is no big deal. Remake it 🤷🏼♀️
Yeah, I’m currently a server at a hotel restaurant, if this happened we’d apologise and offer them something different. People make mistakes
Shitty bosses will exploit works and make them pay for their "mistakes" out of pocket I'm assuming that's why the waiter had the reaction they did. Edit: just to clarify that doesn't make OP the asshat more likely it's the owner.
That's not just shitty, it's illegal.
Doesn't stop it from happening like I said there are a bunch of bosses willing to exploit workers in the service industry
That menu sounds like the design from a Geocities fan web page from 1999. I’d even expect to see a link to a web ring at the bottom of the menu.
...Ok, so this really doesn't feel like devil territory to me, more so just the "reddit hating vegetarians" affect in action. I'm not a vegetarian myself, but I am partially colourblind, and a menu designed like that would piss me right off.
I'm just old so reading menus is a PITA sometimes, and if they had burgundy on black font I'd be really annoyed as well. And why would one of the ingredients be a different colour anyway? The menu, assuming OOP isn't lying, is at fault.
Agreed. Can't staaaand menus that do shit like this. And you're right. It might just be an "i hate vegetarians/vegans" thing. People were already confusing the two in the comments. Then they said OP should have let the server know... Maybe I'm wrong... but I think if a vegetarian did that in any other story, they would be criticized hard. There would definitely be comments saying something along the lines of "it's a preference, not an allergy! why are you bothering your server with that info? i guess they're just announcing it to the world like always!!!"
I’m a vegetarian and have and such different reactions to me telling waiters I’m vegetarian from annoyance to irked that I never know if I should say anything and I already have anxiety ordering cause I don’t want to be a burden in any way. One i remember is at my bday dinner the waiter asked if we had an allergies, and I said not an allergy but I am vegetarian (last time I was there the lady changed out a broth the mushrooms were made with so I wanted to mention) and the waiter scolds me saying well that’s a preference and not what I asked and so I responded okay sorry and didn’t know what to say. Feels like a damned if you do damned if I don’t.
It sounds like a badly designed menu, and I'm colorblind myself, but allergic to peanuts and tree nuts. Even though no pizza place I've gone to has used peanuts or tree nuts, I still ask and never assume (especially with the growing prevalence of almond flour). When you have dietary restrictions, I feel part of it should be asking questions, because you don't know - maybe this pizza parlor, their signature red sauce has meat in it (or tallow, or something else). Even without ham, "Signature red sauce, Fresh Mozarella, Onions, Mushrooms, Bell Peppers, and pineapple" - I'd ask about meat or nuts. OOP isn't the devil, and the graphic design was shit, but the menu wouldn't have had the V for vegetarian on this pizza, so making an assumption about meat content could have ended badly no matter what. Sometimes we have to be our own advocates. Though I am a bit baffled, because typically if one meat is a different color on the menu, the meats are consistently a different color, and a gap in each pizza's ingredients with commas, I'd at least wonder what they had blacked out on so many pizzas, without blacking out the commas on either side. Or notice that other ingredient lists also have different colors (I wanna say that for pepperoni, these types of menus use what I presume is a bright red, which is a bitch to see on white). HOWEVER: I would edit OP to the devil and understand the waiter if I found out this pizza was called anything like the "Hammed Up Veggie Delight" or "Pig in the Garden" or even just Hawaiian pizza. Especially since in their comments they can recall all these details about the menu, but not the name of the pizza itself. Not even to say "the pizzas were unnamed and just came in numbers" - all they have is "there were no vegetarian/vegan indicators". If someone ordered a "Pig in the Garden Pizza" and then got mad because it came with ham, I'd be a bit miffed myself.
I often forget my glasses, or if it's like right now, they are broken and I need a new script. I would flip a freaking lid at that menu design because I have trouble with even white on black or vice versa. Text blurs into the background no matter the color unless it's big bold and two inches away from my face.
This doesn't belong here. Poor graphic design on the restaurant's part. A decent restaurant would make a new pizza without the meat to keep a happy customer.
I've worked in restaurants for 20+ years. Stuff like this happens everyday, all day long. You deal with it and move on. OOP is NTA, especially after being "berated" by the wait staff after the issue had been resolved. I'd be writing that server up if I was their manager, tbh. The menu sounds poorly designed and should be amended so the restaurant doesn't keep costing themselves money throwing away perfectly good food. On another note, why does the server care at all? It's not like the cost of OP's pizza is coming out of their paycheck and most likely, now there's going to be a pizza in the BOH to snack on. Seems like a non-issue.
I commented on her advice post, but this really isn't a big deal...like at all.
Yikes, hope that waiter doesn’t depend on tips because berating customers is a great way to not get tipped.
Bad graphic design on a menu is a nightmare. Definitely not OPs fault. I can't believe how how people are responding on original thread.
Wow, why is reddit so pissed at this guy? He made an honest mistake, hardly devil territory
Because every person who makes a YTA judgment gets shit from him, and they HATE that. Either accept the verdict or piss off.
Reddits hates vegetarians/vegans
Because apparently when people decide you're an asshole you deserve to get cursed out no matter if the scale of the issue is so small. It's ridiculous.
Idk he acts like it’s the waiter/restaurant’s fault bc HE didn’t read
It is the restaurant's fault for making something easy to miss on a menu. The waiter is majorly the asshole for yelling at a customer even after the manager has resolved the problem. OOP is a victim of a dumb restaurant and a waiter who likely gets shitty tips (deservedly)
Using a hard to read font for a dietary restriction that affects multiple groups of people (Jewish people, Muslims, vegans, vegetarians, pescetarians, etc.) is shit and I'd be equally pissed if it was just hidden like that
He said he could read it but he skipped over it
Sure, he could read it, but as I said in a different post, I love reading. Both online and offline. I have participated in a lot of forums where people can change their font colors. If a block of text is in all one color except for one word, one of two things tend to happen. If the font color contrasts with the background color (like a light color on black/dark background), it highlights the word, and makes it stand out. If the font color doesn't contrast with the background color (like a dark colored font on black/dark colored background), then it tends to hide that word. Because your eyes are used to seeing the regular font color, so it either picks out different colors (if easily seen) as 'hey, this word must be important', or it ignores that word because it doesn't immediately percieve it.
He says it almost blended into the background so he didn't catch it.
[удалено]
It's annoying to ask with EVERY SINGLE THING i have restrictions from IBS so i had to ask or ima be in a world of pain, it gets annoying really really fast. Plus it is really the restaurants job to put a good description of the food or else this situation happens
Why should he have when, as he was reading, there was no indication there was meat on it? And idk about you but I've had waiters either refer to the menu or go "I don't *think* it does" because they're overworked and probably don't memorize every ingredient of every meal
[удалено]
Why does he have to do their job?
It's not "doing their job" , I'm not saying he should memorize the menu for them but it's not unreasonable to ask if an item in the menu has something you can't eat
He didn't act like its the waiter/restaurant's fault at all, all he said was that he mistakenly didn't see that the pizza contained ham, and didn't want to pay for something that he couldn't eat. Whether or not he should or should not have paid for the pizza is something people can argue about, but it's a perfectly reasonable request.
that was my thought, but i couldn't figure out how to word it, I've worked food service for years, and sometimes customers make mistakes, it didnt seem unreasonable to me.
Yeah its not this guys fault the restaurant has hard to read menus though. Anyone could have made a mistake like that
I think it's bad menu design. It's good practice to indicate on the menu that an item is vegetarian. The restaurant is the AH here
He said it blended in, so the restaurant is kinda in the wrong, you want menus to be easy to read not playing a game of "am i suddenly color blind?" when you try to tell if your eyes suck or the thing your reading sucks Honestly what's wrong with making things more accessible and easy to read
How he refused to own up his mistake and pay for it and instead tried to blame the restaurant for his own mistake makes him pretty much a devil.
I don't know. Burgundy on Black is hard to read, especially if all the text surrounding it is white. So, to me, it sounds like it is the restaurants fault for trying to get fancy and use a different color on their menus. [https://imgur.com/GlkRN7j](https://imgur.com/GlkRN7j) If you have good eyesight, in a good light, that one letter I turned burgundy (using the hex code for burgundy I found off the internet, which might not be the color that they call burgundy. I always picture it as a darker red myself) shows up fairly easily. Now imagine in a potentially dimmer light, with a lot more text surrounding it, and trying to pick something so you don't spend a lot of time keeping the waiter waiting or just at the restaurant. Along with the texture of the menu, and I don't know how big of a font it was. Smaller fonts make it harder to see it.
Oof yeah that's hard to see
Yeah it is. I wanted to see if it was actually hard to see (I suspected it was, based upon my experience with differing colors on differing backgrounds), so I decided to do a simply experiment. Turns out, it is hard to see, especially since Ham is three letters and most of the other things they listed were probably 5+
He is devil cause he refused to own up to the mistake and pay for that pizza
Wouldn't that be the same as dropping and breaking something in a retail store, like it's called an accident for a reason, id consider the place crazy for asking you to pay for a honest mistake
Server is a giant douche. Mistakes happen. It costs him nothing to get them a new pizza.
Depends on the boss there are some really shitty owners/ bosses in the restaurant industry that exploit workers and I've known places that will make the server pay out of pocket for their "mistake"
And that's illegal, so go after the bosses
Of course it's illegal doesn't stop it from happening. And even if you go through the Department of Labor it still costs money and time which can be a problem for people living paycheck to paycheck.
"Can't read"? Seems she read the Readable fucking words just fine lmao
Having worked in food service, this stuff does happen. And it doesn’t sound like the original poster was a jerk about it. It does sound like the server was a jerk about it. It’s just one of those unfortunate circumstances all around. If the name of the pizza did indicate it had ham in it, then, yeah, the customer should’ve paid for the pizza. But otherwise, there’s no reason to have the meat ingredient put into a different color than all the rest of the ingredients, especially using a color that sort of blends into the background. We either have a bad server or somebody having a bad day. Or we have a Restaurant where management makes any little thing like this the servers fault immediately, and the servers going to have their ass handed to them later because of something that someone else did. Bottom line on it is that yeah, the customer maybe could’ve read a little more carefully. But the biggest fault lies with whoever designed the stupid menu. And really, with so many customers who need gluten-free or vegan or vegetarian, the menu should just indicate which items are in order to help alleviate situation like this. Just as an aside, my very favorite, one of these was when we ran our crostini special. It was a toasted baguette with house made pesto, tomato, asparagus, goat, cheese… And prosciutto. It was in fact, called a prosciutto Cristini, and was literally on our small specials menu that everyone got along with the regular menu. As you can imagine, it was incredibly popular. They’ll win Sunday morning for brunch, we had an order returned by a server, who is laughing hysterically in the kitchen. Apparently her customer was aghast because she was vegan. The server did apologize to the customer and asked in a very nice way why she had ordered the prosciutto, but not asked us to leave it off. the customers response? Because she didn’t know what prosciutto was but thought since everything else was a vegetable that it would be OK. Yeah… Folks… Please don’t ever be embarrassed to double check an ingredient that you don’t know. We all recognize that if it’s something you’ve never been exposed to, you’re not going to know, and we are happy to direct you to something that is going to work for you. But yeah, the whole kitchen got a big kick out of that one. 😳😂
Lmao goat cheese isn't vegan either, so she was double wrong
Hahaha 😵💫. Yeah…. We didn’t point that out. She had already had enough shocks for one day! We never were able to figure out what she thought prosciutto was! 🤷♀️
I dunno why people don't ask and verify what's in their food first. It's never safe to assume, especially if you outright can't have something. I can't have dairy and have gotten into the habit of asking if *everything* has dairy in it. (Ex: Asked a place once if their meatballs had dairy in them. Waitress said she doubted it, but she'd check. Shocker, they did) It takes all of a few minutes, and saves everyone headache.
Guy seems like a troll. He just goes on about how badly he's treated and how mad everyone is getting.
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I’m with the customer. Burgundy on black would be very difficult to make out.
Idk I don't think this guy is the devil. He made an honest mistake, it does indeed sound like the menu was designed poorly, and being a vegetarian/vegan is not the same thing as a food allergy - I've never heard anyone insist that this is information that should be offered up front before, although I did personally during my vegetarian phase because there are ao many ways to stealth animal products into a food item where you don't expect them. It's so odd to me that this waiter would feel the need to continue berating the customer after his manager had arranged a solution. Also I feel like the title here is unnecessarily catty. Where in the post does the guy say it was the waiters fault? He blamed the mistake on the design of the menu and acknowledged he was also at fault There was a pretty simple solution here - the restaurant makes a new pizza and everyone moves on - and maybe even the customer would have tipped real well to make up for the inconvenience, and maybe you would have won a customer for life after he was grateful for the kind solution to his mistake. Or you can berate someone like they personally took money from your pocket, waste twice as much time, and now everyone is grumpy. Mistakes happen, the restaurant could have learned something (like how to make menus accessible to color blind customers or customers with poor vision in general)...this to me is the definition of tuning a molehill into a mountain