There’s no meal Meghan can eat that the British tabloids can’t turn into a verdict on her. Expensive restaurant, vegan café, country pub, a childhood salad bar, even breakfast: the dish changes, the price tag always comes along, and the conclusion is always the same.

Somewhere nice? Extravagance.
When she met Malala Yousafzai for afternoon tea at Claridge’s this month, the Mail told readers it costs £95 a head, with champagne £30 extra. Then it admitted the pair appeared to stick to tea and mineral water. In other words, it priced a drink she didn’t have.

Her sixth wedding anniversary dinner in 2024 made the Scottish Daily Express as a night at a “crazily overpriced” steakhouse. That phrase came from a stranger’s TripAdvisor review. The article went through the menu, from the $26 chopped salad to a $5,500 double magnum of Barbaresco. Nobody suggested they’d ordered either.

A lunch with friends in Montecito last year was headlined on a $95 bowl of caviar crisps, with a caption musing that she “might have been tempted by” them. A $36 shrimp salad made the list too.

In 2023, when she and Harry were spotted at the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills, the story that spread was about a $1,912 salad on the menu. It was an anniversary special served with lobster, caviar and Dom Pérignon; the regular version cost $44. One food site called the couple hypocrites. Again, no one said they ordered it.

Vegan? Still extravagance.
For a 2023 International Women’s Day brunch at Gracias Madre, a vegan Mexican restaurant in West Hollywood, the Mail ran a separate box on what eating there costs. It listed a “whopping” $18 Caesar salad, a $12 CBD drink and a $20 bowl, but never reported what she actually ate. It did wonder whether she’d toasted her daughter’s christening with one of the restaurant’s 93 tequilas. It also priced her mules, bag, coat and sunglasses, roughly £10,000 between them.

A pub? Staged, or done wrong.
Then she did the most British thing possible: fish and chips at a 16th-century Cotswolds pub. The Sun printed the price, £18.25. Commentators said the lunch was a staged photo-op, and a Mirror podcast declared her choice of sauces “sacrilege.”

When the Mail later wrote up where the royals like to eat, it filed that pub lunch under Harry, alongside his love of Nando’s and In-N-Out, and even included her own In-N-Out order there. Meghan’s section listed only Claridge’s, the Polo Bar and expensive Italian places. Her ordinary meals went to make him look relatable; her section kept only the luxury.

Breakfast? Too pricey.
The Express once worked out what her favourite açai bowl would cost every day, about £30 a week. Then it asked whether readers would pay that to look like her.

Now look at William.
He ordered an £18.95 burger and a lemonade at a Wiltshire pub. The owner renamed it the Prince William Burger, and the Mail filed the story under his and Kate’s “down-to-earth” love of pubs. His burger cost 70p more than her fish and chips. Nobody called his pub outings staged, even though the Dog and Duck visit with Kate was a pre-coronation photo-op with cameras invited.

And look at Kate.
The same week the Mail priced Meghan’s tea down to the champagne she skipped, it covered Kate’s visit to a children’s hospice. It itemized her Victoria Beckham jacket, trousers, polo neck and belt, and then stopped. Her $1,995 boots, her $1,330 earrings and the sapphire engagement ring valued at £300,000 or more never made the bill.

The pattern
Pricey is greedy. Vegan is pricey. Pub food is staged. A cheap salad bar is a lie. A healthy breakfast is vanity. The menu keeps changing, but the verdict never does.

Fair coverage wouldn’t mean never mentioning what anyone pays. It would mean applying the same rules to every royal’s lunch.

These comments show the Mail’s framing working in real time. A few things stand out:

• The tequila line landed. A comment joking that Gracias Madre sounds like a tequila bar that happens to serve vegan food got nearly 1,000 likes. The 93 tequilas came from the Mail’s own insinuation, not from anything she was seen drinking.
• The outfit prices became the outrage, and then grew. “Obscene amount of money for lunch date clothing” got 1.3k likes, and “over 10,000 worth of casual clothing” nearly 1k. One commenter guessed $100k was hanging off her arm, which got 1.8k likes, though another reader pointed out the bag was a Chanel 19 at about $5,600.
• The one reader who checked the food was ignored. Someone replied that the dishes were only $15, which matches the Mail’s own body text (“up to $15 a plate”). That’s the same article whose sidebar called an $18 salad “whopping.” The reply got no likes.
• “She called the paps” dominates, along with “those are staff, not friends.” The Mail had named one companion as an Archewell executive, and readers used that to argue she has no friends. It’s the same “staged” charge that greeted the Cotswolds pub lunch three years later.
• Defenders barely register. Replies like “Is she not allowed out to eat?” sit at zero, while the hostile top-level comments run into the thousands. A few threads also drift into conspiracy theories about her children.