Short answer: "No."
Reader persists: "What if you're leaving on a stretcher, suffering ptomaine poisoning?"
Answer: "Is that the waiter's fault?"
There are situations that test one's willingness to be generous. A friend of mine once had a pot of steaming tea poured down his back in a Chinese restaurant. "Was it all right in that case," he asked, "not to leave a tip?" Certainly trying to rip the shirt off your scalded back in a crowd of dim sum diners could distract you from calculating the 15 percent gratuity.
(Interjection from waiter: "We prefer 17.5 percent, and in some circumstances--if, for example, you become engaged, or successfully break up, 20.")
Another friend--and I was on hand to see this--once poked around on his plate and found something that looked like calamari, but turned out to be a band-aid. A used band-aid. My friend paled and lunched only on his Martini. (Which I have always found to be a nourishing meal.)
A woman friend asks: "What if the waiter tries to pick you up? If you leave a tip, will that simply encourage him? If you don't leave a tip, will it reflect badly on women diners in general?"
Tough questions, I know.
Then there are those legendary tippers who score a major business deal and give the valet parking attendant fifty dollars or offer to buy bicycles for all the waiter's children. I don't know if there are any of those left. They may have vanished with the three-Martini, two-Remy lunch and the drop in tax credits for business entertaining.
Is it ever okay to leave a restaurant without leaving a tip?
Only if you can get to your car in a hurry.
Truth to tell, I can recall two restaurants in which service was so abysmal that there was never any question of a gratuity.
ReplyDeleteAfter meals that had eventually arrived slightly below room temperature, I fixed the server with a steely stare and entered a bold "-0-" on the line of the credit card slip marked "Tip."