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Thank you for speaking for the people suffering from the silent epidemic, food-check deficit disorder. FCDD has countless victims, suffering at diners, bars and restaurants nationwide. You have given us a voice. Thank you.

It may be more of a New York issue because people's apartments are very small, so usually entertaining and hanging out happens at restaurants. And as such, you get invited to birthday dinners at restaurants and end up splitting the check across the party, "for convenience." Somehow it never works. But it also never works to pass around the check and have each person pony up either. That's why I avoid large group dinners and only go out with close friends.

We don't do this in my area of the Midwest either. Everyone pays for their own food and drink and tax is split evenly, tips are your own responsibility. We always ask up front if they can split the check, and if they can't, someone who is good at math uses their phone and figures out each person's portion. If you just have people "throwing in" some abstract number, it's always short and some nice but increasingly disgruntled person has to pick up the difference if they don't want to see the server stiffed.

As to the $200 a plate dinner, nobody should be expected to attend that couldn't expense it or wasn't prepared to pay for it. If I knew in advance how much it would be, I would decline going and handle my goodbye with the person on a more personal level.

First, does anyone remember the Friends episode where the money makers planned expensive dinners and then asked the non-money makers to chip in evenly? It achieved a rare sit com brilliance! Second, NY is not a town fond of giving out multiple checks; they hate mul;tiple credit cards!

I am also a freelancer and even my closest friends who are great people, split the bill and say it all evens out in the end. But it doesn't.

Last week 4 of us went out to a great but very reasonably-priced place where they got a very good wine for $45 a bottle. They drank 2 bottles plus 3 more glasses and 2 ports. I was also dieting and had a shrimp cocktail and a Caesar salad for a grand total of $25. After the owner bought us (them) dessert, the bill was still $130 for the food and $132 for the drinks.

But I have devised a plan that never fails: I look at the bill FIRST and say okay, XXX for food and XX for drinks so I owe XXX plus XXX for tip. It works even better with larger parties.

Our solution, in restaurants that won's split the bill for us, is to write our names on the back of the bill with the amount we want charged to our cards written next to it. Everyone sorts out their own total, sans tip, and then we add it all up at the end to make sure we've covered. Then just add tip when the credit card slip comes. The servers seem to appreciate this too, since it means they don't have to remember anything when we hand them multiple cards. I almost /never/ do a straight split when going out with friends.. I would be completely broke!

I hate asking for split checks because I worked my way through college waiting tables and I always used to hate customers requesting it. Major pain. But I agree that splitting the check evenly just doesn't always work. I always try to be cognizant of anyone in the group that is dieting/not drinking/trying to save money and there is a big difference in consumption of either food or beverage compared to the rest. Then it is easy to say, "Ok, John, you owe $___ and the rest of us will divide the bill by #__ of people." This usually works out better than passing the check and everyone throwing in what they supposedly owe, which always seems to screw someone.

Here is what I don't understand about this whole "problem": Is it that hard to add this stuff up in your head or at least with a small calculator? Most of the time people order at most an appetizer, an entree and dessert so you'd have to add up three things in your head. Wine is generally shared equally (or at least close to it) among those drinking it so it should be easy to split the wine bill with the drinkers. Finally you need to include an extra 20-30% of whatever your total is depending on what the local tax rate is and how much you are tipping. This is not that complicated. Whenever I've gone out in a group, we've always paid what we owe and we've never been more than a dollar two off.

Funny, the recollection that this piece spurred for me was along different lines: I remembered a birthday party for a friend at a small, good, and extremely generous restaurant, a place where everybody gets a very big salad, and various antipasti, and bread, priced in with the main course. There were maybe 10 of us there, we all got plates of salad, we all ate the antipasti -- which was replenished whenever we finished a particular dish -- and then four people decided that, really, they weren't that hungry, so they would just split two main courses among the four of them. I was furious. All that salad and salami they had eaten, it wasn't free; it was included in the price of an entree. But the diners just decided to screw the restaurant owners. I wound up putting an extra $50 into the pot at the end of the meal, to cover for their appalling behavior, even though I had never met any of the four people before.