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(Please note: In case you haven’t already gathered this from the title of this post, there may be copious swearing in the following. If this offends, please look away now, or possibly substitute the words “asparagus,” “fork,” “fires of elm,” or “muffle-lumping bastinados,” as appropriate.)

Today was the office holiday party, held at the restaurant named in the title. One might think that a restaurant that names itself after a dairy product would not be entirely vegan-friendly, but I have managed to get vegan meals there in the past: walk in the door, plop down, ask the server if the grilled portobello or other veggie-sandwich-type meal can be made vegan, provide any clarification the server requests, spend several years waiting, and then enjoy a quite passable meal. All this, you will note, without advance warning.

Apparently it takes them a month’s notice to really fuck things up royally.

This is not the fault of our social committee at all. They have always been amazingly supportive and very inclusive, even going to the point of buying a megacase of vegan burgers for our summer cookout — and then cooking them on clean grills before the animal burgers, so they would be uncontaminated. For the holiday party, they checked multiple times to ensure that I could get a vegan meal; each time, over the month leading up to the party, they were told that it would be no problem. Grilled eggplant sandwich, easy-peasy.

Foolishly, I thought that people in the restaurant business actually knew what the fuck they were doing.

Firstly, it turned out that “grilled eggplant sandwich” was the only vegan thing they planned. Before the entree, they served egg rolls (not vegan), spinach-cheese dip (not vegan), and Caesar salad (not even freakin’ vegetarian: anchovies in the dressing). There was bread of mysterious provenance, but I wasn’t sure about it and experience has taught me that most restaurants don’t make bread on premises any more and don’t have a clue whether there’s butter, egg, arsenic, or poison sumac in it, so don’t bother asking. Anyway, I got to sit there during all that, drinking my soda and shredding my paper napkin, while the others tried to eat their first two courses off the little, tiny saucers that were all they were provided. (What the hell? At least give them a salad plate, you chintzy CF bastards.)

“Not a big deal,” I thought, though as time wore on I grew increasingly worried that, given that I had skipped breakfast and had been anticipating a largish meal, I might pass out and fall face-first into the remnants of my napkin. “At least I’ve got a nice big vegan sandwich coming!”

. . . except that, in the CF world, “vegan” apparently means “covered in an assload of cheese.” Yes, fucking cheese.

Repeat after me: NOT VEGAN!

Obviously, I sent it back. I was sorely tempted to wave the little placecard the social committee had given me, clearly labeling me in EU-approved, ISO-friendly fashion according to CEN Standard 69-VGN-S-HL-2007, with veggies clearly printed on the label so it would be accessible to those accustomed to non-Roman alphabets:

(Aside: Gosh, I really hope that my face looks funny because I had to flip the shot in iPhoto, and I was grimacing to start with; if I look like that normally, I need more help than I thought.)

Anyway, back to the kitchen it went, and, after a moment’s reflection, I went and had furious hysterics in the bathroom. After all, they’d had a month’s notice: surely that would be enough to prepare one gods-damned meal properly, wouldn’t it?

Apparently not: when it came back, it was sans cheese but (1) with a huge schmear of mayonnaise-based sauce on one bun, (2) what looked like butter on the other side of the toasted bun, and (3) with what I suspect might have been butter on the broccoli, though Christi, who was nice enough to taste it for me, thought it might have just been salt.

My favorite part: when I asked the server about the mayo sauce, he said, “Oh, well, sometimes people say vegan and they just mean vegetarian, and sometimes they mean really strict vegan.” Yeah, I’m sure that happens a lot, because (1) vegans are just seen as so cool and not cranky assholes at all that we have hordes of groupie wannabes following us around pretending that they too live the glamorous lifestyle of driving restaurant staff insane, and (2) “vegan” is the word that automatically pops out of the mouths of the ignorant, not “vegetarian.” Of course.

Also, he wants to see a “really strict vegan”? I’ll show him a really strict vegan; just let me get my pleather cat-o’-nine-tails and the ball gag. . . .

(Kidding. The closest thing I have to a cat-o’-nine-tails is the fringe on my almost-finished Swamp Witch wrap. I could probably put an eye out with that, but that’s another story. It just bugs me when people call you “strict” simply for, well, doing what you do. Fuck strict.)

Anyway, after another short bout of swearing, hyperventilating, and snuffling in the bathroom (I get emotional when my blood sugar drops too far), I wound up eating the slice of raw tomato on the side of my plate. Mmm, mealy winter tomato. Maybe I should’ve risked the broccoli, but quite frankly I didn’t trust them at fucking all by that point, and would rather have passed out than have risked them introducing dairy to my not-dairy-acclimated system. (Well, unless the effects would have been immediate; it might almost have been worth the risk if I knew the slightest touch of dairy would induce, say, projectile vomiting at the table. Almost. At least it would’ve been fun watching their expressions.)

Anyway, that was my meal. I suppose I could’ve sent it back a second time, but by that point everyone else was finished with their entrees and was contemplating the dessert menus, and I would be damned before I sat there munching broccoli as everyone else headed out the door. Also, trust issues again: how many times can you point out that they fucked up before they start spitting (or worse) in your food?

They did offer me strawberries for dessert, but as mentioned, I trusted them just about enough by that point to be somewhat confident, kind of, that they hadn’t put ground cow in the blasted ice cubes, so I was having none of it. The server didn’t seem to believe me that I didn’t want them, so I finally had to tell him flatly that I didn’t trust the kitchen not to put cream on the strawberries. He looked slightly confused, but eventually he buggered off.

The kicker? My colleague sitting next to me did actually order the strawberries — and they came with a splodge of whipped cream bigger than my fist. Happily, by that point I was resigned enough just to laugh and roll my eyes, but if I’d ordered the strawberries (no mention whatsoever was made of cream) and it arrived with that shit all over it, I would have probably started shouting and sobbing and throwing dishes on the floor and just basically scared the pants off the servers. People in white coats would have had to be called, and some sort of heavy-duty tranquilizer injected into a dart and then shot into my ass, and then I’d be trying to edit chapters and annotating galleys while wearing the very latest in straightjacket fashions.

What particularly annoyed me was that they screwed me over when it would have been so easy to get it right — just ask the committee when they booked, or even fucking Google it. Instead, the Cheesecake Factory people lied, bare-faced, repeatedly, and apparently without remorse, about their ability or their willingness to pay the slightest amount of attention to what they were putting on a plate. Thus, I had a miserable time, probably (and unintentionally) made my friends feel bad, and surely gave the impression to others at the table who don’t know me that I am an unreasonable bitch who is never satisfied.

I don’t like being the sulky vegan. For one thing, it’s no fun; for another, it tends to give people the wrong impression about veganism: that it makes you unhappy, when really veganism brings me great satisfaction and joy. It’s just incompetent shitheads running restaurants that bring out the vegan asshole bitch-cunt-whore-from-hell (VABCWfH for short, pronounced “vabkwif”) in me, and make me have hysterics in the bathroom.

If you run a restaurant, please be up front with customers about what you can and will do for them. If I’d been told ahead of time, I would have brought my food, or eaten before the party. (Yes, I should’ve brought emergency backup food, as I usually do; I was indeed foolish.) Knowing there’s nothing for me to eat is fine. If you can and will do vegan food, wonderful! When you’re not fucking me over six ways from Sunday, I am a polite and grateful customer, and generally tip at least 20 to 25% for your efforts.

Otherwise, you will bring on the everlasting wrath of the VABCWfH, and it shall not be pretty. Not that I can do much besides rant to everyone I know or happen to encounter over the next few months, but still, it won’t be pretty. No, sir.

Bastards.