Restaurant bills

After a very enjoyable meal in the Jambo Grill & Restaurant in Gilmore Place, the other evening, where I ate jerk spiced chicken and plantain (shown above), I started to think about restaurant bills and how they are presented.

This had nothing specifically to do with the Jambo Grill bill.  Their bill was hand written, and like most bills was presented item by item as they had been ordered.  Many restaurants nowadays produce computerised bills.  These also list items as they are ordered.

This is all fine if one person is going to pay the bill.  It’s also fine if the bill is going to be split equally between diners.

It seems to me that, increasingly, groups of people are eating out at restaurants.  The walking group monthly meal, the yoga group end of term group, the this-or-that group.  Often, the people in such groups don’t know each other particularly well, and within such groups splitting a bill equally can have its downside.  Imagine if the group included Albert, who might spend the entire evening nibbling on a bowl of prawn crackers and sipping a half pint of beer with no beer in it, and also Fat Mac, who might order soup, extra bread, six pints of Guinness, a bucketful of vegetables, a bottle of red and a pudding.  Come to think of it, splitting the bill equally between Fat Mac and anyone else might not be very fair.  It’s probably just as well that he doesn’t often eat out.

Now, if you’re well organised, you can ask at the start for separate bills, and this may work quite well apart from the time it takes for everyone to pay up at the end, with their various credit cards/cash.  And it might make the person who initially suggests separate bills to look a bit stingy or calculating.

Instead, why don’t restaurants list items on the bill by diner.  Diner 1 ordered a starter, mains, bottle of beer, coffee – with subtotal £x; diner 2 ordered a mains, a bottle of wine and a coffee – with subtotal £y; and so on, with the grand total at the end.  This would surely solve all problems, would allow each person to pay according to what they ate, or to agree to split the bill, and would show that the restaurant is billing people with them in mind, and not simply according to the food/drink as it is delivered.

King Ayisoba and Ayuune Sule

We went to see King Ayisoba and Ayuune Sule at the Summerhall last night, playing to an enthusiastic audience which very much enjoyed the music from Ghana.  Instead of the usual type of video of the band, I tried to show what happens when you enter such a venue, see the band playing, and then go on to the bar.  You can see what happened below.  Unfortunately the video cut out before I reached the bar.

Recent reads

Last May, serendipitous connections via Amazon suggestions took me from reading The Tears of the Rajas: Mutiny, Money and Marriage in India 1805-1905, by Ferdinand Mount, to White Rajah: A Biography of Sir James Brooke, and thereby on to an interest in the history of South East Asia, which I wrote about here, and elsewhere on this blog.  I bought a number of books cheaply via Amazon about various countries in the region, including several which covered Sarawak. 

It is a fascinating place, and I hope to visit one day in the not too distant future.  However, such plans have been delayed as a result of my son Jamie having started work in Ethiopia.  Now, I need to read up on that country, as Lindsey and I intend to travel there before Jamie’s contract comes to an end.

In the meantime, I’ll shelve the Sarawak books, apart from the following two, which I’ve recently completed.

In a nutshell: Peter Mooney went to Sarawak in the 1950s where he became Crown Counsel.  In these memoirs, he recounts various cases and legal decisions.  He writes in a very precise way, as might be expected from a lawyer, and gives various insights into life in Sarawak in those days.  In 2010 he was living in Scotland.

In a nutshell: Jensen lived in Sarawak for seven years in the 1960s.  He worked with the Iban Dyaks during a period of change.  For a couple of hundred years the Iban had lived a traditional life in longhouses, moving to new pastures when the land became exhausted.  I won’t say that they lived happily during those times, because there was violence, disease and headhunting.  When modern medicine and a ban on headhunting increased the Iban population, more and more pressure was placed on limited resources.  Further restrictions were introduced with the advent of forest conservation, and traditional Iban lifestyles had to change.  Jensen was well aware of this evolution, and worked with the Iban to demonstrate and introduce alternative methods of survival more suited to the modern world.  He writes in some detail about his time with the Iban.

Archaeology, or merely geology?

I picked this up in the Sahara, when walking back to M’Hamid.  I reckon it’s a stone age tool.  The guide wasn’t so sure.

Turkish meal

Jamie leaves for Addis in a few days, so we went for a family meal to Istanbul Palace, in Leith.  Very tasty food, and a friendly atmosphere.

Flying lesson

I took Jamie & Shaun to Dundee, to Tayside Aviation, for a flying lesson.  This was their Christmas present.  Tayside Aviation is a friendly place, and it was quite busy the day we were there.

Shaun’s lesson was first, with Jamie sitting in the back, and with Alastair the instructor.  They flew up the Tay then over to Fife Airport, landed, and then Jamie had a lesson on the way back.