This story is similar to a time when I went to an IHOP in California and asked for some of the vegetarian dish options. To this, the waiter asked “Do you want chicken salad?”…
So tonight, my family and I went out to a nice local mexican restaurant. I got the taco loco (which means crazy taco for the clueless out there). My mom got her usual bean and cheese enchilada. My sister and father split the fajitas vegetarian.
We feasted…no we destroyed the basket of chips greedily. We received our meal and began to do the same.
Halfway through the meal, my father asks me to see what it was. It being a mysterious slightly hard piece of chicken. The chicken was in the fajitas vegetarian.
Being an American (or atleast an American citizen 
), I ask the waiter if that was chicken. To which he replied in his mediocre mastery of the english language “I suppose”. So I ask him why there is chicken in a dish called “fajitas vegetarian”. To this I receive a shocking answer: “Well sometimes, cooks in back you know, area is messy and they don’t clean….maybe it fell in with other meat dishes”….okay thats a good explanation (the last part)…but why on earth are you telling me that they don’t clean a messy area?
I ask to speak to a manager because at that point our apetite was gone. (We are 100% vegetarians from India and we don’t want any of our food to contain meat!) I didn’t want a refund, I was just upset…but I still expected a refund for a ruined meal. To this he replied but “don’t you guys eat chicken?”
With this are 2 problems: 1) “you guys” refers to the Indians who frequent the restaurant and abstain from meat 2) If we ate chicken, why would we have ordered all vegetarian dishes…and better yet why are we still talking about this?
So apparently chicken is not meat. Chicken is technically vegetarian. Lets not even go into the fact that we were stereotyped as the Indians who don’t eat beef but eat every other piece of animal flesh…
The manager took off the dish from the bill, but didn’t seem too sympathetic or caring.
We left unhappy. But now comes a better question, will I ever return? Will I start going to places that have less preconceived notions about a race’s diet and places that know that chicken is not meat? Will I ever step foot in that establishment?
We know the answers to these questions.
But some people still need an answer to the question: Is chicken considered meat?
January 1, 2008 at 10:43 pm
Heh. Once in Mexico, at a restaurant — a tourist restaurant frequented mainly by people from the U.S., my brother ordered tiramisu — an Italian cake — off the menu. Cheesecake came. Hmm, oh well, he ate it, he doesn’t mind cheesecake, and wasn’t in the mood to make a fuss with people who did not share his language. On the way out, we mentioned tthat “the tiramisu was actually cheesecake” to the hostess. She say, “Everyone says that.” Yeah. I bet they do. That’s probably some sort of, um, clue.
Sorry to hear your meal was spoiled. I try to look at such parochial experiences as the price of having the tale to tell, I suppose.
OTOH, what are you thinking trying a mexican restaurant as vegetarians? They have next to nothing for you. Just about every menu item, (e.g. refried beans, “refritos”,) is made with lard, you know.
January 2, 2008 at 6:54 pm
Much the same everywhere, I guess. Prawns are strictly veggie food, as I discovered in Oz. Kimchi has shrimp paste in it, though it is a veg dish. and so on. Yes, scaryreasoner said it well: at least you have a story to tell!