It’s different if you’re choosing to go somewhere fancy and pay for something expensive and then negate the fanciness, but for a free work meal I’m going to give your colleague the benefit of the doubt and assume they know what they like. Don’t gatekeep food, who gives a shit what other people like?
Oh don’t get me wrong, it was wildly entertaining. I’m more of a cheap pizza guy anyway. Our other work dinners were at a local steak restaurant which was much more everyone’s vibe.
Still, it was hilarious to see someone order ketchup with a 200 euro wagyu cut, prior to having tasted the thing. (Pure perfection, best steak ever)
€200 for a single steak, paid for by the company? Man, that is a whole order of magnitude fancier than I was expecting!
Well, that was the price on the menu, but not what we paid :D
As mentioned, the restaurant was one of our advertisers. We helped them plan their media campaign, did the printed menu’s, few other promotional things like that. So the owner/chef invited us to basically dine ‘at cost’ as a thank you. He also planned the six course meal for the entire group so he could cook stuff that he wanted to show off.
So basically… we got an expensive restaurant at a cheap restaurant price. Our company also had about 10 people, so it wasn’t too extravagant.