**TLDR**
A restaurant incorrectly served my friend a cocktail instead of a mocktail which caused her to get an itch & then got understandably upset & rudely made the staff apologize. While I agree the restaurant made a serious mistake, I found her behaviour uncalled for. She then said she is no longer comfortable with going out with me because my disagreement to her reaction was alarming to her as she said could have landed in a serious situation.
**Story**
Friend & I met for dinner & she ordered a mocktail. She later complained she tasted alcohol & started feeling itchy. (She can drink but sometimes might experience a rash if she’s had too much). A waitress suggested it might be non alcoholic substitutes mimicking the flavour & promised to check but due to how busy the restaurant was, she forgot to come back. When the bill came, we saw a cocktail charge & that’s when we realized that my friend was indeed served a cocktail instead of a mocktail. The waitress apologized profusely for the mistake & adjusted the bill immediately, admitting she accidentally gaslighted my friend earlier & my friend got visibly angry.
When the waiter who took her mocktail order came to clear plates, she took the opportunity to confront him. As he was caught off guard, he gave a dismissive "Oh, ok," which made her angrier. When the waitress returned, my friend vented again in a "talk down" tone, reminding her of the "gaslighting" earlier. The waitress’s tone shifted from bubbly to sounding like she was about to cry while she listed out the mistakes on her part & apologized on behalf of her coworker as well.
My friend then demanded the original waiter return to apologize personally & he did so visibly shaken & scared. The restaurant manager stepped in as well, but my friend remained rude & demanding when asking for the APV just in case she needed to see a doctor later & her tone was all like "Just give me a number, I need to know a number.”
FYI, 10 minutes after we left the restaurant, her itch went away.
The manager later texted me to offer a full refund and my friend wanted me to send a collective "we" feedback, harping about how serious the mistake was, about the itch, the poor service recovery & the lack of concrete action & goodwill.
I personally can empathize that restaurant staff are human & oversight happens & I also do not condone the way she spoke to the staff as she was very rude, so I told her she could share the feedback directly herself. I also emphasized to her that I agreed it was a grave mistake on the restaurant’s end, but felt her reaction toward the staff who were clearly shaken was out of line.
She doubled down, citing a friend’s experience with peanut allergy to justify her behaviour. Later on, she said that she no longer feels comfortable going out with me because she found it alarming that I thought she overreacted as she could have landed in a more serious condition.
Yeah, YTA
Your friend specifically ordered a non-alcohoic drink
If the restaurant lied and served her alcohol without consent, she could sue them. There’s liability for their licensing for risking your friend’s health and safety
You also sound like a poor friend gaslighting and blowing off her actual concerns
YTA your friend was well within her right to react like she did. This mistake could have been fatal. What if she was pregnant or a recovering alcoholic. Or drove home and hit someone. This mistake was unacceptable
Yeah YTA. I would be with the staff if they apologized immediately and swapped the drink but it sounds like they lied until they were caught out. Your friend has an allergy (which seems bad to me but what do I know) but they could be in recovery or following a specific religion which would make alcohol a huge no-no.
Your friend was rude but it sounds like she wasn’t rude until after she found out the staff lied and was dismissive. It’s truly not okay to dismiss: “hey I think this had alcohol, it tastes like it and I’m itchy because of an allergy”. I would say E S H but I do think the peanut analogy has merit.
Honestly, YTA. It is an absolutely horrible error for a restaurant to make and then pretend didn’t happen.
Maybe it’s nbd for your friend to get itchy, but people who are sober and trying to blend in, people on medications, etc, etc, etc. There can be SERIOUS consequences for people. You CAN’T give people ordering mocktails a cocktail on accident. When they ask you to double check, you don’t give them bad information that can easily be seen on the tablet.
I’m not saying they should be arrested and put on a list to be tarred and feathered, but the restaurant has to know.
Maybe your friend was rude, but the actions by the restaurant warranted a response and management needed to know. I mean the demanding an apology etc etc seems dramatic.
You ‘standing up for the little guy’ sounds more like virtue signaling than anything else. “ I personally can empathize that restaurant staff are human & oversight happens.” Yeah, most people can.
Honestly, you both sound insufferable and should remain friends 🤷♂️
This is exactly it. The friend may have been slightly excessive but her anger was justified when the waitress brushed it off and never followed up after the initial concern was raised. Management 100% needs to know what happened so staff can be retrained – both to prevent those types of mixups and to ensure they are handled appropriately if they ever do happen.
I’m many years sober, on a medication that cannot be combined with alcohol, and have a food allergy that makes certain alcoholic drinks problematic. One drink would be a BIG problem for me and I would be incensed if waitstaff ignored or lied about something like this. (That said, I would never continue drinking something I was suspicious about either, and I find the friend’s judgment a bit odd in this regard.)
I wonder what would happen if you got pulled over for a breathaliser test and scored too high when you’d only been served a mocktail or two – as far as you knew. Actually kinda scary to think about how many different things could go wrong with this sort of mix up. Surely it would be some kind of negligence charge if anything serious happened as a consequence!?
If someone’s on an alcohol tether for probation, this would potentially send them back to jail, get their probation revoked, or take away their eligibility for a deferred judgment. Serving someone alcohol without their consent, and then shrugging it off as the waiter initially did, should be a fireable offense.
But also itching is an allergic reaction. A restaurant whose response to accidentally exposing someone to something they requested withheld that cause an immune reaction is “Oh ok” is not taking allergies seriously.
How can people then trust they’ll take potentially fatal allergies like shellfish or tree nuts. Or even milder but still uncomfortable ones like gluten?
YTA
Drinking alcohol unwillingly and then getting gaslighted about it is no minor incident.
You should have been more supportive, during and after the interaction.
I would have been furious if a waiter had put alcohol in my drink against my wishes.
Your friend could (and perhaps should) file a complaint against the restaurant.
What if she was a recovering alcoholic or pregnant? The waiter didn’t know why she chose a non-alcoholic beverage l and yet served her one. Her (justified) reaction may have helped to prevent similar incidents in the future.
Yep. You’ve got to assume there’s a reason why someone orders a mocktail – a drink that was specifically designed for people who, for whatever reason, didn’t want to consume alcohol. Also sounds like she may not have been able to taste it and only noticed due to the itch? That’s a serious safety concern in so many ways. What if she got done for drink driving? Just so many ways this could go wrong so yeah, hopefully the restaurant has a chat about this and ups their game around serving mocktails!
Definitely YTA.
YTA
I worked in the service industry and this was a big mistake on the restaurant’s part. We take food allergies seriously, and the staff really messed up by gaslighting and lying for each other. It was only a small rash this time but what about next time when a customer has a peanut allergy? Support your friend.
Triple whammy of “sensitivity/allergy” and “alcohol to someone who asked for virgin” and “charging for a more expensive thing than ordered”. That’s pretty bad!
YTA for not being supportive here. The restaurant was incredibly dismissive *even when they realized their mistake* all the way until your friend really harped on them and “over reacted.”
This is from your own recollection. Where you are trying to support the restaurant.
The restaurant’s mistake isn’t the issue. How dismissive they were over it is.
YTA – this is a huge, massive safety issue that both the initial waiter and the waitress and the whole restaurant mishandled.
People die from things like this.
The response to, hey, I’m having a reaction to something I just ate, it was supposed to be x, can you check if that’s what I got served? was for them to…not check? That is a massive problem.
Let’s be clear, she didn’t so much accidentally gaslight your friend, what she did was flat out not believe her, and not bother to check because she was busy rolling her eyes about a customer she perceived as being fussy, who was actually having a reaction to being served the wrong thing. And even if, giving the waitress the benefit of the doubt, she believed your friend? You do not get busy and do other things when someone is having a medical reaction to a food, you prioritize that and check.
Whoever put in the order did it wrong, and you know that because it was on the receipt as a cocktail. The waitress, who you asked, should have immediately checked the order, which would have been in the system, to verify what the order was, and your friend would have immediately known. The bartender or whoever made the drink could have been consulted.
There were multiple points of failure. Every person besides your friend handled this wrong.
It doesn’t matter that your friend didn’t have long term problems as a result. It doesn’t even matter that your friend doesn’t have a worse reaction to alcohol than she did. What if it were an ingredient she was allergic to? What if she was an alcoholic? What if she was on a medication that can’t be mixed with alcohol? What if she had a religious or other reason she didn’t drink?
In the end, her reasons for avoiding alcohol do not matter. What matters is the multiple times the restaurant failed to give her what she ordered, and refused to verify that what they served her was what she ordered.