Bride Sobs After Brother Orders 20 Pizzas to Vegan Wedding

When it comes to your wedding budget, your venue, flowers, and décor may receive the bulk of your attention—and for good reason. The spot where you decide to say “I do” to your partner and celebrate your nuptials is incredibly important. However, after tying the knot, you and your guests may have worked up a substantial appetite. And as a result, your catering vendor or overall food spend is also a critical part of your budget. In 2020, experts estimated that the average food cost for a 66-person wedding was just over $4,000—or roughly $60 per plate. One recent couple decided to allocate even more dollars to their dinner service, spending almost $15,000 on a gourmet five-course meal. Yet upon finding out that the decadent menu was entirely vegan, some guests revolted—and opted to order pizzas to the reception, much to the dismay of the bride. 

In a post on Reddit’s “AITAH” subreddit, the bride posted about the conflict. “I (28F) just had my wedding last weekend,” she wrote. “My husband (30M) and I have been vegan for three years, and we decided to have an all-vegan reception dinner. We spent months working with an amazing chef to create a gourmet five-course meal that just happened to be vegan—think mushroom wellington, truffle risotto, roasted vegetable tarts, etc. We spent nearly $15,000 on the food alone.” While she said that she and her partner didn’t explicitly mention that the food would be vegan on the invitation, she ensured that every dish was “designed to be delicious and satisfying, regardless of dietary preference.” However, at the reception, she quickly noticed that her brother, Tom, wasn’t seated at his table. “Twenty minutes later, I watched in horror as he and my cousins walked in carrying 20 large pizzas,” she wrote. “They started distributing them to guests, announcing ‘Real food for anyone who wants it!’ I was mortified. The caterers looked so embarrassed, and several guests hadn’t even tried our carefully planned menu yet.”

When the bride confronted her brother over the unapproved order, he told her that her aunt had informed him that the food was just vegetables—and that they would be going hungry at the wedding. “The pizza completely upstaged our expensive gourmet meal,” the original poster wrote. “People were taking photos and treating it like a joke. My mother-in-law posted on Facebook about how her son’s wedding was ‘saved by pizza’ because the bride tried to ‘force everyone to eat rabbit food.’” Distraught over the fiasco, the bride said she ended up crying in the bathroom—and the groom had to ask her brother and cousins to leave the celebration. “This caused a scene, and now half the family is calling us stuck-up and saying we ruined our own wedding by ‘pushing our beliefs’ on everyone,” she wrote. “They’re saying we should have warned people about the vegan menu.”

Her fellow Redditors were ultimately divided on whether or not the bride was in the wrong—with many taking issue with the fact that she didn’t disclose the vegan menu on the invitations. “I mean ordering pizzas was out of line but you hid it on purpose knowing people wouldn’t like the idea of it,” one commenter wrote. “Yes it’s your special day but being deceptive doesn’t help anyone.” Another person agreed: “Honestly, there is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to serve a vegan meal at your wedding, but you didn’t disclose that because you KNEW folks were going to have responses to it. A heads up would have been the right move here.”