To eat and run is to have a meal, or even just a snack, and then leave almost immediately afterwards rather than staying on. It is most often heard as a kind of apology, in the form “sorry to eat and run” or “hate to eat and run”, said by someone who has to dash off straight from the table because of another appointment, a lift waiting, or simply a lack of time. The phrase can also describe someone’s general manner of doing things briskly and without lingering, as when a meeting or visit is dealt with in the same no-nonsense way a hurried meal is. Less commonly, it is used to describe diners who leave a restaurant without paying, closer to the idea of a “dine and dash”, though the apologetic sense of simply leaving quickly is by far the more usual one.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘eat and run’?
The phrase is a straightforward piece of colloquial English, built from two plain verbs joined together to describe an action done fast and without ceremony. Dictionary.com dates it as a colloquial expression from the first half of the 1900s, though it gives no earlier citation and names no particular coiner. Its own example sentence shows the figurative stretch the phrase had already taken on, describing a meeting run so efficiently that “in effect it’s eat and run”, with the literal meal dropped entirely and only the sense of brisk, no-lingering business left behind.
Beyond that, little can be said with confidence. At least one idiom reference site states that the origin of the apologetic form “hate to eat and run” is not clear, but this appears to be an unsourced aggregator comment rather than the result of any real etymological digging, and it should be treated as such rather than as evidence that the phrase’s origin has been seriously investigated and found obscure. What is clear is that the expression grew naturally out of ordinary table manners and apology, the kind of phrase that needed no inventor because the situation it describes, having to leave a meal early, is common enough to have produced its own shorthand. The occasional use of the phrase for customers who leave without paying is a later drift in meaning rather than part of its original sense.