Sunday evening, Arcata California. My wife Kitty and I are in Mazzotti’s Italian Restaurant on the main square, and we want nothing more than enormous plates of carbohydrates, which the menu promises in spades. As we consider which monstrous dish of starch to order, we are both struck by the conversation at the table beside us. They are very close, and very loud. It’s not as if we’re trying to eavesdrop, it’s just impossible to not listen. And what’s remarkable about the conversation isn’t how interesting these two people are, but how amazingly pretentious and snobbish they seem to be.
The young man is dressed in tight knickers with a sweater of some sort, and a driving cap. The young woman across from him is decked out in a skin-tight, low-cut red shirt. The young man is going on and on about all the insights he’s gained studying philosophy in Canada. There’s no doubt in his mind that he’s right about everything, and he speaks as if every word is a hundred dollar bill he’s been inconvenienced to pull from between his teeth. He peppers his conversation liberally with the names of obscure philosophers and their obscure maxims in order to prove his points. The young lady smiles, nods, and makes small interested noises.
The wife and I look at each other and get to work on our booze. After ordering, we try to strike up our own conversation, but the table beside us is joined by a third who drags a chair into the brief space between our table and theirs, affectively bridging the psychological buffer zone that offers some semblance of privacy in the intimate setting. The conversation, once merely interminable, now becomes completely unavoidable. Luckily, the third doesn’t stay long. Kitty notices that as he leaves, the young woman immediately pours his wine into her glass. Odd.
Our food arrives: mine, a calzone that dwarfs my head, hers, a startling serving of eggplant parm. For a moment we are lost in our food, but I’m pulled out of my gooey, cheesy, salty reverie by the sudden realization that the couple beside us is now speaking gibberish. It’s some kind of secret code language consisting of single letters and numbers in rapid succession with the occasional wet tongue click. Their tone is strange and conspiratorial. And I suddenly feel guilty thinking they must have caught on that we were privy to their conversation. I try to mind my own business.
We are sharing a waitress with their table, and every time our server comes to check on us, they lean in and interrupt to request something new. So far they’ve amassed on their table: one whole pizza, two pasta dishes, a bottle of wine, cocktails, and various other unrecognizable dishes that have been picked apart and left to cool and congeal.
This time they request coffee—the young man ordering with the kind of entitled flourish I’d come to loath from certain patrons I’d had the misfortune to serve myself in the past.
These two have now become the evening’s entertainment for Kitty and I. Dinner and a show, so to speak. But we’re also trying to do our best to ignore them, make small talk, etc.
When the coffee arrives at their table, the young woman leaves, passing us with a cherubic smile. The young man is left to request the check. When it comes, he spends a few minutes chatting up the waitress. He’s a philosophy student from Canada, blah blah blah, on a road trip in the US, blah blah blah. Oh, and he’ll be paying cash, he informs the waitress. He makes a point of that. Cash.
For all of our interest, Kitty and I don’t notice he’s gone until we realize we’ve been able to speak to each other freely for five minutes. Then several restaurant staff gather at the table beside us:
“Are they gone?”
“I don’t know. The coffee is still warm, should I bus it?”
“No, the check hasn’t been paid and there’s still a lot of food. Just leave it until they come back.”
Minutes pass. They don’t come back. We watch as our waitress angrily snatches the bill from the table, stalking out the door with an angry look and a sense of purpose. We’d just witnessed a dine and dash of significant proportion. The table beside us is littered with the remnants of what was easily a hundred dollar meal. Kitty and I start replaying everything we witnessed. Should we have seen it coming? Could we have warned someone?
We pay our bill and vow that as the night progresses we will keep an eye out for the hoodlums. Later in the evening I think I see the young man exit the bathroom of the bright naugahide bar where we’ve propped ourselves up. I spring from my barstool and give chase, popping out a back door into an alley. I look both ways, but he’s gone. I have no idea what I would have done if I caught him. Eventually our boldness is done in by alcohol and we drift back to our hotel room to sleep.
I post this story as a kind of learning tool. In the last week, I’ve wondered about the dine and dash. As a server, I never really thought about it happening to me. But I wonder if it’s ever been a concern for any Blogtownies in the service industry. Are there signals to look out for? Can you catch them before it happens? What are the consequences for a server after someone skips out on the check? On the other hand, I wonder how many Blogtownies have dined and dashed. And do you regret it? Let’s get into it in the comments.
Awesome!
I’m really interested in the part where they were talking to each other in code. You think they were planning their brazen escape during that interlude?
Once in New Mexico when I was 17, and almost again at Adobe in Yachats when I was 26, but neither of those are remotely as intricately exciting as this post. Nor were they planned ahead of time.
What does one tip on a dine and dash?
My only dine and dash was at the Baghdad. 30 minutes after receiving cocktails and our food, we were ready for a quick second round and the bill. Not only did our waiter never return, but no waiter ever returned, even after telling the bartender that we were interested in settling the bill and taking off (He said he’d send someone over to take care of us).
An hour after finishing our food, we’d talked to a waiter, a busser, and bartender about our desire to leave, but the fabled check never came. We just walked out.
I really don’t understand how Mcmenamin’s manages to hire such entirely braindead staff. Baghdad is by far the worst, I refuse to get dragged to any of their locations now because the experiences trend so hard to the aweful.
There was also an incident in Mexico, but that was less of a dash and more of a bribing our way out the back of the kitchen with some of the pharmaceuticals that we were too blacked out to remember we had spend our fine dining budget on.
@ nothing offensive. Ha. Same thing happened to us in a McMenamins establishment. I think it was the Blue Moon?
I think it happens at least once a day at every one of their places.
I unknowingly had the opportunity to dine and dash at an IHOP outside of St. Louis in the middle of the night after a show. The waitress clearly hated her job, and as I remember even talked about the Steak ‘n Shake (or maybe it was Denny’s) nearby that she was hoping to switch to.
Food took forever and sucked as much as you’d expect at an IHOP. When it was over, we walked up to the front with the check, waited another five minutes for her to show up, and were greeted with “Oh, you’re going to pay?” And for some reason, we did.
My single worst dining experience ever was at the McMenamins Market Street Pub. I won’t go into details. I didn’t dine-and-dash, but I shorted them about 50%. That’s what I thought it was worth. After getting food poisoning at the Raleigh Hills location, McMenamins is permanently banned (except maybe the theaters).
Mediocre beer, bad food, awful service, how do they stay in business?
I’ve never worked for a more poorly managed company than McMenamins. It’s tough to provide good customer service when you’re asked to wait 12 tables sans bartender or food runner. (Or when you’re both cooking food AND running it, as was also customary at my old pub.) That being said, no one ever dined and dashed on me when I worked there, surprisingly enough. I also do my best to avoid setting foot in their establishments these days, ’cause inevitably I get all rage-y and spend the whole time talking about how much I hate it.
in it’s heyday (late 80’s) Quality Pie on 23rd probably had 25% of it’s patrons walk on their tabs between 2 and 4 am.
not that i’d advocate doing anything like that….
I went to the McMenamininns Grand Lodge and we walked out even before we got our drinks. I think that place was the worst.
I’ve dined and dashed once, in Houston. We sat upstairs and waited like 10 years to get our food (pizza!)and then we were ignored. When we were ready to pay, we tracked down the server. She gave us a bill and asked us in a spacey voice if we could pay someone downstairs….there wasn’t much dashing as we strolled out the front door.
My friend is always trying to talk me into dine and dashing at the Horse Brass,though. He does it all the time, says it’s easy there. But I like that place and it’s not worth the risk to me.
“My friend is always trying to talk me into dine and dashing at the Horse Brass, though.”
Sounds like quite a guy. Glad I don’t know him, or anyone who would call him a friend (i.e. you).
Wow, Judgy McJudge, I feel like I belong now that you wrote something mean to me!
And it seems that my attempt to warn anyone reading this post who works at the Horse Brass about how easy it is to walk a check there was too subtle?
Funny, how nobody on here who dined and dashed thinks it was there own fault…who is the bigger douchebag, the proud antisocial or the lame rationalizer?
What a couple of assholes. They usually make the server eat the tab, in those cases. That being said, it took them five minutes to notice!? When I was waiting tables, I would watch anyone toward the end of their meal like a hawk, especially after coffee and requesting a check, not to mention the fact that one of them had already left the table.
Someone walked out on a cocktail server at my work the other day, but it turns out she’d tried to get my roommate to pay her tab, after her card was declined. He refused but kept the receipt she gave him, with her name on it. I found out where she works on facebook. No pity for this kind of crap.
I would be surprised if they can legally make the server eat the tab for that. But they can give the shit for letting it happen, even fire them. Bottom line, this is a shitty thing to do … unless you are doing it to McMenamin’s….
I used to be a manager for a chain of restaurants in Seattle. We’d get about one or two dine and dashes a month. That’s just the kind of stuff that happens in restaurants.
But we’d also never make the server eat the cost for the ticket. That’d be some cold-hearted bullshit.
I dined and dashed at the Holiday Inn restaurant in New Mexico. Similar story to others, we asked and waited and waited and waited for the check, and finally gave up and left. It took them about half an hour to get us our food too, which was, scrambled eggs that had been sitting under a heat lamp all morning and a cup of Orange Juice.
Dear dine and dashers who felt entitled to do so because you waited and waited and waited for the check: Whatever happened to a) leaving an appropriate amount of cash, or b) getting up and finding a server/manager yourself? And I don’t buy the “we talked to four people and no one came!” b.s. either–it doesn’t take much effort to walk up to a server’s station or cash register and ask to pay right there. Lame rationalizers indeed.