For one professional caterer, this holiday season got off to a rocky start. It was Thanksgiving, and she had spent hours slaving over the stove, making sure everything was perfect for the guests who had been invited to her Brooklyn home for dinner.
“Three vegetarians had RSVP’d to come, and it was a dinner for 20. And so it was just easier for me to make a lot of the things vegetarian and have the meat dishes on the side,” recalls the 30-year-old, who requested anonymity for professional reasons.
“And then, at the last minute, at 8 p.m., an hour after the dinner was called for, they canceled on us. The only three vegetarians who were invited. I was so mad. I could’ve put so many delicious things in the food, and I didn’t. It’s such a bummer.
“I don’t know if we’re not speaking to them, or they’re not speaking to us,” she adds, “but there is definitely some animosity.”
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These days, running out of ice, wine or room for coats is the least of a New York host’s worries. Rather, it’s the guests themselves — or at least their fussy dining habits — who are driving them nuts.
Alejandra Ramos is as accommodating as they come when she’s on the job. She owns her own culinary concierge service, and recently had to cook for 14 New Yorkers who trekked to Vermont for a women’s entrepreneurial retreat.
Of the 14 ladies, one was gluten-free, one was dairy-free, one was vegan, two were vegetarians, one was a pescatarian, one was allergic to shellfish and one ate only white meat.
But when it comes to indulging the dietary restrictions of her guests during the onslaught of at-home holiday dinner parties, Ramos, 28, is joining the growing ranks of harried hosts who are putting their collective foot down.
“I probably wouldn’t have a raw-vegan friend,” admits Ramos, a self-professed meat lover, laughing. “And if I did, I wouldn’t invite them over for dinner. Maybe just cocktails.”
It’s amazing that Kyle Megrath, a strict Upper East Side vegan, gets invited to any dinner parties at all. “I don’t eat anything with eggs, dairy, poultry. I don’t eat cheese [or] any meat,” rattles off Megrath, who is morally opposed to eating animals. “I’ve been a vegan for eight months now.”
“You go to these parties where there’s this spread of things, and they’re just like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s fine.’ But I can tell if some bread has a yolk cover on top before it’s baked. I sort of notice it, and I’ll take it and throw it away or something and try to avoid that I’m not eating your food.”
As a result, the 27-year-old is known to bring Tupperware filled with tofu if he’s going to a close friend’s home — a practice that some find downright rude.
“I think I would smack that person. I would never have him back,” says Jamee Gregory, author of “New York Parties” and a frequent dinner host, of Megrath’s Tupperware-toting ways.
She may have to get smack-happy. New Yorkers are acquiring new dietary restrictions at breakneck speed, for reasons ranging from health and diet to having just devoured Jonathan Safran Foer’s book “Eating Animals,” which describes the farming process in detail. In the past year alone, sales of gluten-free goods soared 37 percent nationwide according to Nielsen.
And these discriminating dieters defend their hard-to-please habits.
Filippa Svensson, who lives in Chelsea and works in p.r., became a raw vegan three years ago. When dining at people’s homes, she will ask to bring something, pick around the available provisions or, more often than not, make a point of eating dinner beforehand.
“When you go to someone’s house to be entertained, what you’re really going there for is not to eat, but to have a good time and hang out with these people,” says the 29-year-old. “So food shouldn’t be that important, because you’re together.”
But for a lot of New Yorkers, food is of the utmost importance, and whether or not their guests enjoy the cuisine can be a deal-breaker. “I’ve definitely noticed people are becoming . . . I don’t want to say picky, but it’s like, what are you?” says Kris Schoels, who hosts friends for dinner at her Weehawken, NJ, pad twice a week. “It definitely makes things more complicated for me.”
Schoels, who runs the entertaining site youngmarriedchic.com, says she has “just learned to be more prepared,” and inquire in advance about guests’ dietary restrictions.
But that didn’t stop her from nearly poisoning a pal. “I was having a friend over who had been diagnosed [with a virus] and basically has to eat gluten-free. I was so excited. I had done all my research. I was cooking up a dinner of asparagus and quinoa and fish,” says Schoels, 28. “And we go to sit down to eat and I say, ‘Oh, I made this great marinade for the fish,’ and just as she’s about to take a bite, she’s like, ‘What’s in it?’ And I say, ‘Garlic, lime juice and soy sauce.’ ”
Unbeknownst to Schoels, soy sauce is chock-full of gluten.
“I asked my friend, ‘If I hadn’t said anything and you had eaten that fish, what would’ve happened?’ And she said, ‘Oh, we might have ended up in the hospital.’ ” Despite the near disaster, Schoels was lucky that her gluten-free guest followed proper etiquette and at least gave her a heads-up.
“It’s on you to let your host know,” says Daniel Post Senning, great-great-grandson of etiquette guru Emily Post. He adds that “this is becoming a more prevalent problem.”
“As a host, you’re supposed to . . . do the best you can,” he says. “Try to put something together at the last minute.”
Manhattan event director Joe Wickes, 33, an event director at the party-planning company Jes Gordon, advises hosts to simply offer a “flexitarian” table, with sauces on the side and plenty of veggies. “At the end of the day, it is your house. It is your dinner party,” adds Wickes. “There is nothing wrong with people coming over and you saying, ‘This is the dish I am serving.’ ”
dschuster@nypost.com