Of the reasons why we tip in restaurants, the most compelling has nothing to do with nice waiting staff or fine presentation. (These are naturally welcome, but not so welcome that we wish to pay over the odds for them.) No, the reason we tip is simply to avoid appearing cheap.
Avoiding the embarrassment of appearing cheap is the guiding principle of restaurant eating. And the more expensive the restaurants, the more embarrassments there are to avoid. Nowadays the very instant you walk into a good restaurant, there are an embarrassment of embarrassments awaiting you.
First off, if it's a particularly good restaurant, you'll be embarrassed by the doorman. Next up the coat-check woman. Have you ever seen anything less than a quid in those cash-filled trays on the coat-check desk? That's why you don't hand over your coat. Explain that you keep your emergency insulin in your coat pocket and that, for life preservation reasons, you'd prefer to have it by your side.
Perhaps wise to the fact that people are now holding on to their coats, many restaurants have taken to stationing a person in the lavatory to save you from the indignity of pushing the top of the liquid-soap bottle: in other words, to embarrass you into giving them some heavy change.
If your meal involves a reasonable quenching of thirst, you may have to visit the loo as many as three or four times. And that won't leave much over from a fiver(certainly not enough to cover your taxi tip home). There are two alternatives. One is to hold it in until you get home(warning: this tactic can lead to medical complications). The other is to carry obscure and worthless currency, and pretend to be a tourist from somewhere like Albania. Embrace the liquid-soap operator, double kiss him, and hand over a fistful of zloties.
Naturally, all of this is merely small change, an amusing appetiser by way of preparation for the meal itself: the service charge. One of the great mysteries of restaurant eating is the process by which you order a starter and main course at a combined cost of £18, and yet your share of the bill is never less than £64.50. The wine of course explains part of the discrepancy, even though you haven't drunk any for fear of needing to reward the liquid-soap operator. And some of the difference is accounted for by the selfish swine who always insists on having the lobster (£29.50) and the most expensive Sauternes (a tenner a pop).
But even then, it still doesn't add up. Just as cosmologists have invented the concept of 'cold dark matter' to fill in the gap between how much mass the universe is supposed to contain and what it seems to contain, so too have restaurateurs invented the cold dark matter of the service charge to plug the difference between how much they want to charge you for a meal and how much they really want to charge you.
Once an opt-in issue(at a recommended tip of 10 per cent), the service charge is increasingly opt out, which is to say the restaurant has preordained how much you should pay. For this new service of removing the worry about how much to pay for service, most restaurants charge an extra two and a half per cent, making the new service charge 12? per cent. Before the tip.
Oh yes. In addition to setting the service charge, and the charge for setting the service charge, many restaurants also leave room on your credit card slip for a further tip in the hope that you won't have noticed you've paid one already. Just draw a smiley face in the empty section as a token of your appreciation.
But what can you do about the main 12? per cent? If you're in a large group (i.e., bigger than two), leaving early is a cunningly effective ploy. Simply say that your baby/spouse/whoever is ill and you need to go - add up the price of your food, plus a conservative guesstimate of the drink you've had (don't include the pricey mineral water), stick a five per cent tip on, make your apologies, leave 25 quid on the table, and go. Very quickly.
Failing that, take a moral stand. Encourage one of your less sober dining partners (perhaps the freeloader who chose the Sauternes) to protest about the outrageous imposition of an obligatory service charge. Then just before the manager arrives, excuse yourself to the lavatory. And don't forget the zloties. Cheers.
