You might have read this week about the insane, obscene, disgusting meal that Vice Media founder Shane Smith and some thirty friends and colleagues enjoyed last month in Las Vegas. It was a dinner at the Prime Steakhouse at the Bellagio and the bill came to $300,000. The most expensive entrée on the menu at the Bellagio is an $85 rib-eye. Apparently numerous bottles of wine that cost more than $20,000 each were ordered.
I like to imagine that, rather than offering to pay for the whole thing himself, Smith suggested that everyone split the check evenly. “Let’s see,” he says, clicking the calculator icon on his iPhone. “So that comes to … $10,000 each, not including the tip.” The personal assistant sitting next to a Vice VP of marketing grimaces. That’s a third of his annual salary. And he didn’t even have any wine. He doesn’t drink.
We all could relate, I’m sure. A few years ago, at a friend’s birthday at a casual Italian restaurant, someone’s husband, who was a venture capitalist and an oenophile, volunteered to order the wine for the table. There were maybe a dozen of us there, and we all liked to drink wine, and we had a terrific meal. (The wine he chose was delicious.) But when the check came, everyone thought that there must be a mistake. We all owed over $200 - and we’d shared appetizers. The guy had chosen wine that no one at the table but him could afford. There were complaints, to put it mildly, amongst the six of us lined up at the cash machine at the deli next door.
The thing is, big group dinners suck.
I don’t mean to come off as a grump. I consider myself a “people person.” There are few things in life that I value more than a long, relaxed meal with friends or family. I love eating, drinking and talking. And not having to clean dishes afterward.
But there are lots of problems, like size. When it comes to dinner parties, bigger is not better. Often, bigger is worse. Six-to-eight people, I think, is the optimal number to gather around a table. Maybe nine or ten, if everyone there speaks pretty loudly and knows how to take their turns - and if you can get a circular table, but only then. When the number gets any higher, everyone can’t talk to everyone.
One large, boisterous conversation must be broken into several smaller ones. And chances are slim that they will be equally boisterous. Experienced dinner goers know this, and the issue arises of scoring the right seat: between two interesting, pleasant people and not trapped next an annoying drip. It’s a phenomenon that turns perfectly secure, ostensibly adult human beings into panicky 7th graders rushing through the cafeteria lunch line so they can get a spot at the cool table.
If you lose at this game, your boredom and headache are sure to be exacerbated by your spouse shooting you eye-contact “ha-ha” looks from his or her perch in the lucky fun zone - between bouts of uproarious laughter and fascinated gasping. (Oh, there’s another problem: the pressure to not sit next to the person you arrived with; to “mix-it-up-a-little” for socializing sake. There’s a reason that people choose to date or marry the people that we do. We like them better than other people.)
So, a proposal: a mandatory limit on the size of tables that craftsmen and furniture companies are legally allowed to make. A maximum number of ten for restaurant reservations. And the strict assessment of fines for any establishment caught pushing two tables together.
Even on those rare occasions, though, when everyone gets to sit with whom they want and has a good time during the meal, the arrival of the check is all but guaranteed to send the event spinning into chaos and then off a cliff into a pit of flames and molten lava and poisonous snakes who can survive living in molten lava. People eye the little black folder warily, then someone decides to be a grown-up and reaches for it and some other person, a hilarious person (sometimes me) says, “Oh, wow, thanks so much!” like the one who reached for it is going to pay for everyone else.
I am an advocate of splitting the bill evenly, pretty much every time. Yes: even if you didn’t have an appetizer. Yes: even if you didn’t drink any wine. (I realize this puts non-drinkers in a difficult situation, especially alcoholics. It ends up being like a tax on responsibility. The world is unfair. I don’t like it, either.) It’s just easier, and friendlier, and the situation is already so fraught because this is one of the things our society is just weird about.
My advice in any group dining situation is to order in such a way that you won’t resent paying as much as everyone else at the table when the check comes. Unless previously discussed, the assumption for dinner at a restaurant is that everyone will order an appetizer, and entrée, and a dessert. If you’re not planning on eating dessert, order the most expensive appetizer. If you’re not drinking wine, order two of the most expensive appetizers. Order two desserts. Take one home in a doggie bag. I’m serious. I will not mind. I will be drunk on your share of wine.
Somehow, the fact that we all have powerful computation machines in our pockets has not made it any easier to figure out how to do the math required to pay a restaurant bill. “How much tip are you leaving?” your neighbor whispers, in a pile-of-credit-cards situation, as if he or she doesn’t know that the answer is always twenty percent and that we all have a powerful computation machine in our pockets.
How and why, when it comes to cash, is the collected total always, always, always twenty dollars short? Even when everyone has counted their contributions so carefully? Does the gravitational force of a party of ten create some kind of whirlpool miasma in the center of the table where the money is being collected, like the Bermuda triangle? Like a wormhole? Where do these mysterious missing bills disappear to? It’s uncanny.
Inevitably, at least one person will not have enough money. He or she will be embarrassed and ask if anyone at the table can “float me” until the next gathering, when the favor will be repaid. What can you do? You shrug and pony up, knowing that the favor will not be paid at the next gathering. Eh. It’s okay. It all comes out in the wash.
Except in the cases when the person who does not have enough money is always the same person. In this case, the person should be executed. I mean excommunicated.
No, I mean executed.