To survive, many speakeasies had the police on somewhat of a payroll so that they might be warned of a raid. This possible origin stems from the Prohibition era at a bar called Chumley’s located at 86 Bedford Street in New York City. It later evolved into a code that restaurants and bars used when they wanted to cut someone off, because they were either rude, broke, or drunk, as in “86 that chump at the end of the bar.” Prohibition Era Raids
Believed to be slang for the word nix, it was initially used as a way of saying that the kitchen was out of something, as revealed in Walter Winchell’s 1933 newspaper column that featured a “glossary of soda-fountain lingo” used in restaurants during that time. Regardless of whether it was the first to coin the phrase 86, the restaurant business in the 1930s was one of the main incubators for its usage and development.
