Dine and dash

A dine and dash (also referred to as "dine and ditch", "lick and split", "chew and screw", "running the check", "eat and fleet", "mash and dash", "chomp and romp'", or "grub and snub") is a form of theft by fraud, in which a patron orders and consumes food from a restaurant or similar establishment with no intent to pay, then leaves without paying.

Legal aspects

Simply failing to pay a bill when due is generally not a crime in most circumstances or jurisdictions. It is a contract debt, and the act is civil rather than criminal in nature. However, there are often laws that apply specifically to restaurants, hotels, and other circumstances, where the presumption is that the customer never intended to pay their bill and therefore obtained the valuable services under false pretenses, a form of criminal fraud.

There are isolated cases of establishments making their employees pay the cost of customer theft to give them an incentive to police their customers. They may do so explicitly by deducting unpaid meals from wages or tips, or implicitly through an end-of-shift reconciliation system whereby the server is expected to provide enough cash and credit card receipts to cover the cost of their customers' meals, and keeps any surplus as tips. The practice is generally illegal. (In Alberta: Deductions that are not allowed: There are certain deductions that an employer is not permitted to make even if they have the employee personally authorize the deduction in writing. They include deductions for: • faulty workmanship, or • cash shortages or loss of property if an individual other than the employee had access to the cash or property. Examples of faulty workmanship include accidental damage to an employer’s vehicle or equipment, “walkouts” in a bar, breakage in a restaurant and mistakes in production.)