Do you say "Check please" at restaurants? Why?

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Whether you’re asking your waiter, “Check please!” or telling your dinner partners that you’ll “grab the check,” the term has become so common in our lexicon, it’s easy to miss that it’s a puzzling choice compared to the more literal term “bill.”

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“The conventional wisdom is that the check (an Americanism) dates to the mid-nineteenth century and was used because the bill served as a means of checking what dishes were being charged,” explained Andrew Haley, an associate professor of American cultural history at the University of Southern Mississippi and author of the book “Turning the Tables.” “Everything was a la carte in nineteenth century restaurants and patrons ordered a lot of dishes.”

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The check helped keep everyone honest because there was a culture of distrust in eateries during the 19th century and early 20th century, according to Haley.

“Diners didn’t trust their waiters, and waiters didn’t trust the management, and the management didn’t trust the waiters or the diners all that much,” he said. “Everyone thought somebody was trying to pull some sort of fast one on them.”

Haley explained how restaurant operations at the time bred those suspicions. Well-heeled restaurants in the 19th century didn’t have the plate dinners we have now, which come with, say, vegetables, a starch and a protein.

Back then, depending on how much time you spent there and how fancy the dinner was, there could be three to seven courses, or even more, Haley said.

If you look back at the history of menus in the U.S., they were far bigger than they are now.

“There were a lot of dishes moving back and forth, and this created some opportunities for abuse,” Haley said. “Waiters could slip in extra charges. If, at the end of the day, you were ordering dozens of dishes, somebody might not notice whether there was an extra plate of corn or peas that had been served up.”

To hold everyone accountable at some eateries, checks would be put in front of you on the table, where you could see exactly what you were being charged for, Haley said.

He explained how a scam might have worked: “The waiter adds items to the bill, and the waiter — or, perhaps a head waiter who is in cahoots — collects the payment. But they only give the restaurant the cost of the food actually ordered, and they pocket the extra.”

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