If you have to pay the money up front, you're less likely to buy; that's true for houses because they cost so much, and it's true for meals because there are lots of small individual charges in the course of a full meal. I guess restaurants find that the money lost via dine-and-dashing is not as bad as the money lost to misers.

There are substantial differences between the resturant and housing situations. Short of burning it down for fun there isn't really any way to consume a house. Also, the person who sold the house got paid for it, its the person who loaned the money to the buyer who is fucked. It would be more like if you took out a loan from a bank, used it to go out to eat, then couldn't pay back the bank. Maybe you are an asshole for not being able to pay, but the bank is incompetent for thinking you would be able to.

Anyway, as far as I can tell resturants are all about experience, and maybe forcing the customer to prove they can pay would degrade the experience to the point where the resturant makes more money by just accepting the occasional dine & dash.

Also in a real resturant if a customer was sitting there baldly refusing to pay, you could probably just call the police (I dont know, I've worked in resturants and have never even heard of this happening).

That is an interesting insight. I wonder how restaurateurs project customer default rates when analyzing new opportunities? They must teach this in hospitality management schools...

Regarding the housing comparison, the nature of the credit, the goods exchanged and the fact that maturities are so much shorter in restaurants (1:8)[1], allows (requires) restaurants to engage in riskier business practices. Mortgage lending risks are obviously much more complicated, but you are correct to point out that risk is an inherent part of issuing credit.

[1] Assumes 3 hours credit issued to the average customer, with average inventory borrowed for 30 days.