The best tip is to tip by Bill Kay

You’ve reached the end of a satisfying meal. You are nicely full without bursting. The couple of glasses of wine have gone down nicely. You may even have indulged in a liqueur. Life has dissolved into a pleasant haze. Then the bill arrives.

You knew it was coming, of course, because you almost certainly asked for it. All the same, this is the moment of sobering reality, when that blue or black folder lands, containing the business end of the evening.

Let’s assume that you haven’t been charged for anything you didn’t receive, and that the total is not wildly out of line with what you expected. The question remains: do you tip, and if so how much?

This is a world-wide question. Providers of service expect to be paid over the odds, often for doing no more than their job. After all, unless you are remarkably flush (or pretentious) you don’t tip the chef who produced your meal - so why tip the flunkey who walked it maybe ten yards?

This is an increasingly tricky issue in LA, where everyone who can is getting in on the act. It poses particular problems for an expat like myself, because it is not always easy to be sure whether you are being taken for a ride or confronted with a genuinely different custom.

I don’t know about you, but in London I never tip if I am collecting a takeaway meal from a restaurant. As far as I am concerned, I’m the one doing the waitering. I also hated the aggressive attitude of some of the people who delivered meals to my door, so I eventually stopped ordering that way. But in LA, in both cases you are politely presented with a bill which, surprise surprise, leaves room for a tip and the total blank.

Is it the local practice to tip then? So far I have stuck to my British habit and no one has given me a hard time as a result, but the only way to find out is to ask friends. The answer, so far, is to ignore the tip.

But, coming back to the end of our excellent restaurant meal, the moment the bill arrives can be deeply divisive. I go to dinner most Mondays at a scruffy diner in Pasadena, where a floating group of anywhere between 4 and 24 friends pitch up and at the end we get our own bills.

It’s not a fortune, $10 to $20 a head for burgers, salad, steak and chips, that sort of thing, and the same smiling waiter serves us all. But we discovered that some tip generously, some meanly, some a nominal $1, and some not at all.

After reading the latest US book on tipping - Waiter Rant by Steve Dublanica -I would think twice about not doing so, especially if you are intending to return to the scene of your crime. Dublanica was a waiter in New York, where restaurants notoriously take no prisoners.

I have been chased to the door by a Manhattan waiter who had calculated that I left less than the “minimum” of double the sales tax: on US menus the prices are shown net of tax, which is usually around 8.5%. Doubling that to 17% sounds a lot, but it works out very close to the 10% UK diners add to a bill already inflated by VAT.

There are basically six reasons people don’t tip:

They think the service was bad
They aren’t returning to the restaurant, so see no reason to be nice to the waiter
They object to tipping in principle, as demeaning to both waiter and customer
They think it’s a ripoff that they should pay on top of the menu prices
They think why pay when I don’t have to?
They’re mean
Personally I normally prefer to tip the standard amount, and a little over the odds if I have had good service. I scrub the tip completely only if it is obvious that I have had a bad meal, and the restaurant knows it.

But how you tip, or don’t, tells you a lot about yourself - as does a lot of discretionary spending. Know thyself before thou risketh ye serving lout spitting in thy soup.