The world of apps promises something like a frictionless existence—eliminating all the moments of pause, of tension, of quotidian vulgarities like handling money. On a recent afternoon, Tal Zvi Nathanel, a thirty-one-year-old Israeli expat with funky, big-framed glasses, sat down for lunch at Sala One Nine, a tapas restaurant in Chelsea. I met him there with one of his associates, Mike Paffmann, who was dressed in business casual and hardly uttered a word. Nathanel’s outfit left some room for contextual interpretation—a blazer over an X-Men T-shirt—but his manner was straightforward. “We’re in a business meeting,” he said, as if setting terms. He began telling a story about a night out in Tel Aviv in 2011 that led him to an entrepreneurial epiphany. “Sake doesn’t get me drunk; it gets me somewhere else,” Nathanel said. He was a generous talker with a salesman’s enthusiasm, touching his beard and his smooth, shaved head. The menus went untouched for a while. “There are social aspects that come with dinner that nobody likes to talk about. Like settling a bill. It gets awkward,” he said. The hazards are particular to the circumstance. On this occasion—the officially declared business lunch—Nathanel explained, “If the server asks me if I want to use a punch card, I wouldn’t do it right now.” If it were a birthday party, that would create another set of complications entirely. “Nobody wants to talk about it.”
Nathanel is the America-based C.E.O. of MyCheck, which allows people to split and pay a bill on their phones, sans wallet. On that night at a bar in Tel Aviv, he thought, Wouldn’t it be cool if I just walked out like I owned the place? But how can you just walk out of a place? Obviously, you need to pay. Paying is a ritual that Nathanel seems to find excruciating. (This holds whether or not one has the money.) “For centuries, nothing has changed,” he explained. “Then, fifty years ago, the credit card came. Paying, it’s almost like surgery. It’s a clinical act.” He went on, “Check comes; it’s always the same thing. It doesn’t matter how great the experience of dining was. When you want to go, you want to go.” Lingering at a table, plates cleared, wine glasses empty—what’s there left to do but fidget anxiously?
Some time passed. The water glasses were filled. Paffmann remained quiet. A thought occurred to Nathanel, “Do you want to eat?”
“Do we have to do anything first?” I asked.
Nathanel took out his phone, which had been in his pocket. “I usually recommend people adding each other at the beginning,” he told me. “I don’t like people messing with their phones during the meal.” But, for the sake of demonstration: MyCheck is an app, and it’s also the technology that enables the app, which can be used by other apps—which Nathanel’s company will customize for particular brands, such as Aroma Espresso Bar, for instance—and PayPal’s app, with which MyCheck partners. As far as diners are concerned, no matter which app they use, they input their credit-card info, check into the restaurant (Foursquare style), and, voilà, a four-digit code is generated. “So, instead of giving your credit card, you give the code,” Nathanel explained. He announced his code to the waiter. Once the waiter selected a MyCheck button on the touchscreen of the restaurant’s service system, the order appeared live within the app, allowing each person to select which items, or percentage of the meal, to pay for. There’s a sliding scale for the tip; each shop sets a base percentage, but you can fiddle with it at will, keeping the servers on their toes or posing as a high roller until the last dish comes. MyCheck gets a cut of each transaction—somewhere around three and a half per cent, depending on the restaurant.
I hadn’t yet downloaded the app. Nathanel shrugged. “Even if I’m the only person with the app, I still avoid the social awkwardness, because I can say, ‘I just paid for my part.’ ” This assumes, of course, that his fellow-diners don’t mind sorting out the rest among themselves. Or that Nathanel wouldn’t be too aggrieved by witnessing the exercise. But, if he were, he could just walk out.
Bread came, followed shortly after by fried goat-cheese balls. “This experience is made possible by twenty-five points of sale around the world,” Nathanel said, referring to the checkout systems that restaurants use to input orders. In addition to New York and Tel Aviv, MyCheck has offices in the United Kingdom and Brazil. In some cases, the point-of-sale companies—like POSitouch, at the place where we had lunch—will contact restaurants about adding a MyCheck button; other times, Nathanel will make his pitch directly, promising faster turnaround, fewer walkouts, and higher tips. He said that some three thousand spots around the world (restaurants, coffee shops, gas stations) have a MyCheck button on their service screens, including a couple hundred in New York. “What surprised me is that the high-end places have them,” he said. (They include Rouge Tomate and Gotham Bar and Grill.) “In a high-end restaurant, everything is so fine, so the idea that you don’t have to deal with money at the end makes so much sense.”
The main course came, but Nathanel asked the waiter not to take away the last cheese ball. We got sandwiches. Though it went unspoken, tapas seemed too logistically confusing to share among strangers in a professional context. And then there was the matter of paying—how to split if there’s an uneven number of dishes?
As we were about finished eating, the waiter tried to clear our plates. Nathanel resisted. “They keep trying to take our plates away!” He still had something left. Then he demonstrated how to close out. He pulled up our order on his phone, selected all the items—he insisted that we not split this time, and I lacked the technological means to do the ritual insisting—and paid the bill. He received a receipt by e-mail. We could have left, then and there, but he continued to nibble. The waiter returned, smiling and offering dessert menus. This presented an awkward moment: we had already settled up, but perhaps the server didn’t know it. We looked down at the table, unsure of what to do.