Splitting a Tab--Let Me Count the Way
Brad Altman of Los Angeles asks me to discuss check-splitting protocol. To celebrate a promotion, he writes, he and four office colleagues had lunch one day recently at Musso & Frank’s in Hollywood. When the $88 bill arrived, the group gave the waiter four credit cards and asked to have it split four ways. At first, the waiter refused; after a discussion with his superiors, though, he did split.
“From a customer’s perspective,” Altman concludes, “a four-way split was at worst a minor . . . imposition on the restaurant cashier, who had to imprint and fill out four credit cards instead of one or two.” Was he being unreasonable to ask for such a split? he asks.
For my money, yes. A two-way split is one thing--and perhaps it might be argued that, in a large group with a large sum of money involved, four ways might be acceptable. But splitting an $88 check in four sounds plain petty to me. Don’t any of these guys carry $25 or so in spendable cash? Can’t at least one or two of them handle the math that would be involved in working out a split among themselves? And the imposition on the cashier is not a minor one. Not only must four credit-card blanks be run, but four credit cards have to be checked for validity (a process that sometimes takes a couple of minutes per card, especially at peak hours) and then filled out.
Different restaurants obviously have different rules about such things--but I’ll tell you one thing: If I had a restaurant, I sure wouldn’t split $88 checks four ways myself.
RUMOR CONTROL: Mauro Vincente, proprietor of Rex II Ristorante downtown, Pazzia on La Cienega, and Fennel in Santa Monica, called the other day to say that he felt like shooting somebody. Word had reached him that a local radio broadcast had announced that Rex had closed. This is absolute nonsense, fumed Vincente. Though admittedly no longer doing turn-away business as it sometimes did in its first, hot months, Rex is thriving, he says. A new chef, Gennaro Villella, has been installed, he pays all his bills on time, he has a number of large-scale private parties booked, and he is doing quite well, thank you.
Another restaurateur who feels like reaching for his pistol sometimes in Jean Leon. He says that he hears almost daily from one source or another that his venerable La Scala in Beverly Hills is going out of business. Again, nonsense. But because his lease is running out and rents have jumped extraordinarily for the premises he occupies, he will move both La Scala and the adjacent La Scala Boutique to a new location, also in Beverly Hills, sometime after the end of September.
WAITER, I’VE DROPPED MY HAND: The next time you sit down at a restaurant table and discover that you’re missing one or more pieces of silverware, you might stop to think that at some tables, you wouldn’t get any silverware at all. According to a study based on figures abstracted from various 1980 world census reports published recently in the Cooks Magazine, while some 1.5 billion people eat with a knife, fork, and spoon worldwide, another 1.2 billion eat with chopsticks, 350 million eat with a knife and their hands, and 250 million eat with their hands, period. The latter are the only group among whom it is considered perfectly proper to walk off with your eating utensils in your pocket.
NOTES AND NEWS: Robert Bell, chef and co-owner of Chez Melange in Redondo Beach, begins a six-session UCLA Extension course entitled “Starting Your Own Restaurant” Tuesday. Fee is $200. Call (213) 206-8120 for details. . . . The California Restaurant Writers Assn. will again present a series of wine scholarships, sponsored by Domaine Mumm and the Seagram Classics Wine Company, to a select number of restaurant-service employees at their 21st annual Awards Banquet on March 27. Scholarships pay for approved wine appreciation courses or sommelier’s training programs, and are open to any service personnel working for restaurants that serve wine. Call (213) 851-1023 to obtain an application blank--which must be completed by Feb. 28. . . . Stir Crazy, which serves “California Lite Cuisine” in the Brentwood Gardens complex in Brentwood, has opened a second unit in the Century City Marketplace. . . . And on the off chance that you find yourself in Jupiter, Fla., with a hankering for Modern Southwest food, John Sedler, chef and co-owner of St. Estephe in Manhattan Beach, will cook a week’s worth of meals there, at the Jupiter Beach Hilton, beginning tonight.
