[masraum]

It sounds like you had a great meal and service right up until the request to separate the check.

There are a lot of places that will not separate checks for parties over a certain size (often 6 or 8 people).

Announcing no tip after a good meal with good service due to a lack of splitting the check would make me very uncomfortable. My wife and I were asked out to dinner by her mother and her mother's significant other. The meal was probably a few hundred dollars. The mother and her guy drank and he especially got really obnoxious with the server (who was great), and then tipped $20. My wife and I were appalled. When we all left I made an excuse to go back inside and gave the guy all of the cash that I had in my wallet (wasn't a ton, but made the tip much better) and apologized.

Seems to me that rather than withholding tip for services already rendered at an acceptable level it would have been better to talk to the manager about the check splitting.