We’ll Take the Bill, Please.

There are few experiences in life equal to the pleasure of savouring a wonderful meal, and sharing a glass of wine with friends. Unfortunately, there are few experiences in life equal to the torture of bickering over the tab with those friends.

Making plans to dine out with friends for the first time is always a tricky proposition. There is no real way to predict what someone else will feel is acceptable in a restaurant until you share a meal with them. On the one hand, it can raise the friendship to another level. It might be a perfect outing with delicious food and flowing wine complementing lively conversation and laughter. Of course, the success of an evening doesn’t depend on one factor alone. It’s possible to prevail through terrible food and a lack of ambiance and still enjoy yourself. It’s harder, but it’s possible. I remember one notorious night in a small Northern Ontario town. The chairs were plastic; the food was unpalatable and overpriced - our salads (Catalina, Ranch or Italian?) coming to the table in old wooden bowls that belonged on a bridge table from the 70s. All of the ingredients for a horrible night were there. Yet from the moment the laser printed menus arrived at our table to today, the mention of “Cochrane Fine Dining” will send us into peels of laughter. So, regardless of the quality of the meal itself, your night out with new pals might be the kind of night that lays the foundation of a life-long friendship. On the other hand it might not.

There are several ways your other hand might play out and those could range from a mildly boring evening, to one that will live on in infamy through the remainder of your life. The really bad nights aren’t the ones where you realize that you don’t actually have that much in common with your tablemate(s). Those evenings might feel longer than they actually are and you may spend a good portion of them thinking up excuses why you’ll never be able to do anything with your dinner companion(s) again. But they probably won’t have you leaving the restaurant in a rage. Rage-inducing evenings are usually the result of a discovery at the end of your friendly encounter, a dawning awareness that your new pal is cheap.

I once attended a dinner with about eight other women. The evening was joyful, the food was delicious and the wine was shared by all but the two women at the table who were pregnant. Some women ordered appetizers while others did not. Some of us ordered dessert while others couldn’t stomach another bite. But regardless of who had ordered what, the night’s theme was “try this”. Plates of appetizers were passed around so that everyone could get a taste of something special. Desserts were brought to the table with multiple forks and everyone had a taste. It was a lovely experience, until the bill came. One of us suggested that we split the bill evenly with the exception of those who hadn’t had any wine. It seemed fair and most of us were nodding when another of the dinner guests said, “well, I didn’t have an appetizer and I only had one glass of wine.” Silly me, I hadn’t realized we were supposed to be counting. Of course, even though I hadn’t been keeping score, I’m self-aware enough to know that if a bottle of wine is open, odds are I’ve had my share of it. However, if we’d all only had one glass, would we have been able to return the remainder to the bar for a discount? The problem with settling the bill is that as soon as someone opens the floodgates of “I had this but I didn’t have that” they force everyone else at the table to go down the same road. Which means that the final part of your evening is spent doing calculations in your head (although, perhaps if I only had one glass of wine, I wouldn’t find this so difficult). Many of us would rather spend way more than we’d planned to avoid debating over money at the end of a pleasant meal and so, on this occasion, we did.

But we shouldn’t have had to. When you go out for a group celebration or a group meal (with the possible exception of work-related functions which are not always optional) you should split the bill evenly across the group. Don’t accept the invitation if you can’t afford to go – if you’ve only got $16.75 in your pocket and you are heading out for dinner, you should either bow out or find yourself a patron. Because ultimately, if you eat out often, sometimes you’ll come out on top and sometimes you won’t but it all comes out even in the end. Because the truth is that when you dine out in numbers, you aren’t just paying for the food, you are paying for the experience itself, so unless you don’t want to be invited back, cough up the cash, my friend. And, just for the hell of it, have another glass of wine.