Reply to How to RSVP to an event and (politely) mention that I am a vegetarian?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm a vegetarian. In a restaurant I wouldn't say anything in advance. There's always something. Even if the salad has bacon you can easily and quietly request a plain salad.

I'm not in the group that thinks you never mention being veg, but in this case I don't think its necessary. [b]Only one time was I completely unable to be accommodated (it was at a Chinese restaurant - in the south! - at a large party served family style, and they just kept saying I could have white rice and they were unable to serve anything else). I picked at some plain rice [/b]and stopped at a sandwich place after .[/quote]

The restaurant kept saying that!? Crazy. What Chinese restaurant doesn't have a mixed veggie dish or tofu dish on its menu?! I certainly hope you mean the party you were dining with didn't keep saying that . . .[/quote]

NP here.  I'm Chinese and there are some restaurants that cannot accommodate if you are vegetarian or vegan.  The problem is having a vegetable based dish, it's having one that is strictly vegetarian.  There are some restaurants that use Hoison or Oyster sauce (both seafood based) in most of their dishes.  Many use chicken stock routinely in all cooking.  And there is no guarantee that even the soy sauce is completely vegetarian.  While the main recipe/process is vegetarian, most soy sauce companies also produce other sauces that are not vegetarian and do not guarantee that there is no cross contamination unless they specifically do so on the label.  In those cases, they set aside equipment specifically for certain products to avoid cross-contamination and label the products accordingly.  This restaurant probably did not have the procedures in place to guarantee that a dish was entirely vegetarian and had been coached to say they did not have any vegetarian products on the menu.  It's safer than way than to serve someone something and they find out that they complained because a tablespoon of chicken broth had been added or because a tablespoon or fish-based sauce was used.  Many such restaurants are run by families where English is a second language and they don't understand enough English to know all the nuances of a foreign different dietary restraint and rather than get in trouble for trying to do the right thing and then getting yelled at, blamed, they just don't accommodate a request that they don't completely understand.

And lest you think this is a simple problem, it isn't.  I have actually seen vegetarians go into a Chinese restaurant and order what they assume to be vegetarian food only to find seafood based sauces or chicken broth in the order and severely berate the restaurant for not advertising that they use animal products in their sauces.  I know several restaurants where they don't want to deal with this and just say they don't have anything vegetarian on the menu.[/quote]

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