Restaurateur Couple Hosts Party at Their Restaurant and Charges Guests

A woman is fuming after two of her friends who own a restaurant hosted a private birthday party at their business — and charged all their friends full price to attend.

In post on Reddit, the anonymous 30-year-old woman writes her friends, whom she calls “Meg and Dave,” own “a popular restaurant in town, and they invited about 40 people to celebrate Megan’s birthday there.”

“They closed the restaurant for the night just for the event, so it was a private party with only their invited guests,” she adds.

At the beginning of the night, Dave made a birthday toast, encouraging guests to “order whatever you want!”

“So everyone kind of assumed it was being hosted, or at the very least subsidized. Nobody expected a free night necessarily, but the vibe was definitely, ‘you’re invited to celebrate with us,’ not ‘this is a group dinner and you’re footing your own bill,’ ” the woman writes in the post.

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But at the end of the night, servers began distributing individual bills to all the guests.

“Turns out everyone was charged full price — food, drinks, everything,” the woman writes, adding: “Most couples ended up paying around $350 for the night, some more, some less.”

The woman adds that guests were “really thrown off,” noting that attendees thought they were “guests at a party, not customers at a business.”

“Megan and Dave are not hurting financially — they just built a brand new home, drive luxury cars and take vacations,” she adds.

She ends her post by estimating that the couple “profited around $5,000 from the night — off of their closest friends,” adding, “It just felt super icky, like we were tricked into attending what was actually a cash-grab dinner disguised as a party.”

Now, she wants to know if she’s in the wrong for being annoyed or if it really was as bad as it seemed.

Fellow Reddit users are squarely on the side of the party guests.

Writes one: “So they basically scammed you all into paying for their birthday party and even made a profit from the con? Those con artists aren’t anybody’s friends.”

Adds another: “If you invite someone to a party, the understanding is that the host pays! They tricked you and ambushed you. I would end the friendship over this. Edited to add: send them a printout of this post, with all the responses!”