Fat Guy

And that system has worked well enough, in places, to get American restaurants to where they are today. American restaurants have, indeed, made remarkable progress over the past few decades. But there is room for advancement: the level of excellence routinely achieved by Michelin two- and three-star restaurants in Europe remains elusive for all but a very few American restaurants. Thomas Keller's restaurants do excellent food, but I'm sure Thomas Keller knows they could do better food. And viewed from the standpoint of systems, the Europeans know how to do that better than anyone else. In all this talk of how tips can be used to reward good service, there doesn't seem to be any acknowledgment of the fact that we don't actually know how our "reward" fits into the big picture. We leave a $250 tip. It seems generous to us. But in a vacuum it means nothing. Do we know how many ways it gets split, in other words how many waitstaff there are total? Do we know how many covers the restaurant does per night? Two different restaurants each present a $1,000 check. We tip $250 at each. At one of the restaurants, they do 80 covers a night and have 40 front-of-house staff and they only serve dinner. At the other restaurant they do 120 covers a night and have 30 front of the house staff who work lunch and dinner. For all we know, the servers at the first of those restaurants may be taking home half as much per shift as at the second. It could be the difference between earning $50,000 a year and earning $100,000 a year. Meanwhile, in both restaurants the servers are excellent. And the cooks are making $20,000 a year. Thomas Keller knows you don't have to let captains earn $100,000 a year to attract great ones. And I bet he thinks he can get a little extra out of his kitchen if he pays his cooks a little better. With pooling and a service charge, maybe he thinks he can push his cooks to $40,000 and his captains to $70,000. I don't know the exact numbers and ratios, but I suspect he does. I hope it makes Per Se a better restaurant. Someone like Thomas Keller shouldn't let four New York Times stars be his crowning achievement. He's not playing locally; he's playing on the world stage, where four New York Times stars are only as good as one or two Michelin stars.

I'm pretty much unconcerned with looks if there's a superior (from a utility standpoint) material available at a reasonable price. I imagine the best countertop material is stainless steel, and I'd have gotten it in my kitchen but it seems to be a totally unsupported material for home use -- I couldn't even get anybody to give me an estimate. But granite seems to be a great material not just because it looks good but also because it makes great countertops. Quite a few top restaurants seem to be using granite for utilitarian reasons, or at least that's what they say.

That's the exact Corian we have.

300% (also known as approx 33% wine cost) is the standard markup in fine dining restaurants, as I learned when I spoke to quite a few beverage directors while researching a story for Food Arts a couple of years ago. If you add a 20% service charge to a 300% markup you get, for example, $100 = true cost of wine, $300 = marked up cost of wine, $360 = cost of wine after markup and service charge. Now assume you might have tipped 10% on that bottle, at $30. That makes the final pretax difference $330 versus $360 on a $100 bottle of wine. Who cares? Whether or not wine markups are justified is beyond the scope of the topic I'm sure, but it's worth noting that they're lower than the markups on bottled water, cocktails, coffee, desserts . . . and food (food costs typically run in the 20-30% range while wine costs are more like 33%). I'd call the view that "it's just the same stuff in the bottle" the reductionist view of restaurant wine buying. If you make an intelligent choice from an intelligent list, you're paying for a lot more than just what's in the bottle. The wine may be aged, in which case it doesn't exist in wine shops. It may have been aged in a temperature controlled facility and subject to the carrying cost of the inventory. You're paying for the restaurant to have hundreds of wines available immediately at the right temperature so you can select the one you want right then. There is no trip to the wine shop for you, you don't have to acquire stemware and you don't have to pay if you break the restaurant's stemware, you can have your wine decanted by someone else, you can send back a corked bottle. You can get the advice of an expert sommelier who knows the wine and food inside out. Someone has to pay that person's salary, and that person is often a manager outside the tip pool so you have to pay through the cost of the wine. In any event, there is still no less or more service involved in pouring a $150 bottle of wine versus a $1,500 bottle.

Granite needs to be resealed, but resealing granite is a cinch and can be done with cheap, over-the-counter products every few years (whenever water stops beading up on the surface). I'd say, having done it once for a friend, that it's easier than buffing Corian.

Surely, there are a few other service industries where tipping is the norm, though most of them fall under the same "hospitality industry" umbrella as restaurants: coat-check, bellboy, etc. There's some sort of dividing line, though, between a gratuity that's a little extra and a gratuity that's the whole wage. My building's superintendent, for example, gets maybe $1,000 in tips at holiday time. And maybe I give him $20 when he comes over to do some repairs. But he makes a decent living one way or the other -- the gratuity is just some extra, and he doesn't extort tips out of the residents by withholding services from those who don't tip as well. It's a fine arrangement. But in other buildings, with different casts of characters, it can be a total nightmare.

The example I cite most often is that it takes very near the same amount of labor to serve a table of four as it does to serve a table of two. As between tables ranging between one person up to about five people, service is more of a per-table thing than a per-person thing. Talk to captains at nice restaurants before a shift and they'll say "This is going to be a great night; I've got all four-tops" or "Tonight is going to suck; my station has almost all two-tops tonight."

I don't know that it's an installation issue. I've used Corian counters in plenty of kitchens, including in the pastry kitchen at Lespinasse where you know they installed it right and it sits on a very heavy stainless base cabinet. In every case, I've found it to be "springy" or "bouncy" when I've pounded on it. I don't like to have to modulate my cooking behavior on account of the properties of the surfaces in the kitchen. I can do it, of course -- it's not tremendously inconvenient just to put a cork trivet down before you put a hot pot down -- but when you add up all the little hassles in most kitchens cooking becomes more obsessive-compulsive than pleasurable. Give me a stovetop that's solid enough such that I don't have to care how hard I slam a skillet on it. Give me a countertop that I can pound a veal chop on without spring-back or transfer of vibrations to the whole rest of the house. Give me stuff that works. I'm no conspiracy theorist, but I've got to think that DuPont and Cosentino and the others have pulled off a major marketing ploy. People are paying more for fake granite than for real granite, and real granite is better. I think by now I've heard every argument against granite and they all seem utterly unconvincing. Does anybody have granite and not like it?

It's similar to the food issue: it takes no more service to serve a plate of caviar than to serve a green salad; yet the tip or service charge on a plate of caviar may be 15-20% of $150 whereas the tip or service charge on a green salad may be 15-20% of $8. I think people are just more alarmed by it when it comes to wine, because the variation in wine prices is so large and also because there's a perception that wine is just a purchased, prepared food -- like a can of tuna or something. The thing is, why should a customer be able to decide after the fact how much to pay for wine service? This is an excellent example of tipping having absolutely nothing to do with the quality of service. Some people believe you should tip the full amount on wine no matter what the price; some people believe you should tip 10% on wine but 20% on food; some people believe you should tip a flat fee on every bottle of wine, say $10 per bottle no matter what the price. Quality of service never enters into the equation. It seems a little strange that people who routinely pay 300% markups on wine (in other words, just about everybody who eats in a fine-dining restaurant) are balking at a 20% service charge. But in any event, if the exact cost of a bottle of wine or any other good or service is announced up front, there is no courtesy or control issue. The price is the price. You are given the courtesy of ordering it or not at the agreed upon price; you have control over whether or not to order it at the agreed upon price. Just as in every normal retail transaction, you get to decide. It's just that you decide in advance instead of afterward.

I'm not happy with my choice of Corian. I wish I had done granite. In addition to the cons noted above by Arne -- that it looks fake and scratches easily -- I would add that it feels fake. I'm not just talking about the fact that it feels like plastic and lacks that awesome cool-to-the-touch feel of stone. I mean it feels flimsy when you pound on it in real-world cooking. A big inert mass of granite is an excellent surface for pounding a veal chop. You try that on Corian and it doesn't give you anywhere near the same kind of support. Most of all, though, I'm annoyed that I picked an ugly color. What was I thinking? The nice thing about granite is that it doesn't seem to exist in ugly colors. Corian, however, is manufactured in something like a million ugly colors. Silestone seems a lot more like granite, but I really don't get the point. Why expend all that effort to make artificial granite when real granite exists? What's next, artificial sand? It's not like we have a granite shortage. Practically the whole damn crust of the planet is made of the stuff. Just dig some up and make it into a countertop for crying out loud.

There are law firms that work on the model you've suggested. There's also the example of the Cahill system (Cahill Gordon & Reindel, where Floyd Abrams is a partner), where there is no assigning partner. Rather, associates are responsible for getting their assignments. They accomplish this by approaching partners individually for work. There are some interesting benefits to this system, particularly that it is said by some associates to impose "market discipline" on unruly, obnoxious partners -- those partners find that they can't get any associates to work for them. Cahill is a highly successful firm, so there must be some validity to the Cahill system. At the same time, Cravath is by many measures a more successful firm than Cahill -- many will tell you that Cravath is the best law firm in the world; something I've never heard anybody say about Cahill -- and the Cravath system couldn't be more different. In other words, there's more than one way to skin a cat. If you don't like the Cravath system, go work at Cahill, or vice-versa. However, neither Cravath nor Cahill is funded by a bizarre regulatory exemption wrapped around an even more bizarre gratuity system that depends on that exemption for its viability. Remove the exemption and force tipped establishments and service charge establishments to compete on the merits and see what happens. I don't think it's any coincidence that the (small, inconclusive, but probable) trend among the very best restaurants is towards the service charge. The professional sports analogy doesn't seem relevant to the case of Per Se, because Per Se already has pooled tips. The change is from pooled tips to a pooled service charge. The expected improvements in esprit-de-corps would seem to derive from a variety of sources: bringing the front of the house and the back of the house closer together, eliminating customer whim as a control factor, making servers more like employees. Different players on a sports team make different amounts of money, but so will different employees at Per Se -- captains make more than front waiters make more than back waiters make more than bussers. Better servers will surely be rewarded in various ways: better private party assignments, easier stations (more four-tops, fewer two-tops -- it takes just as much work to serve a two-top as a four-top), vacation priority, shift priority, etc. And of course there is the opportunity to rise into management. Those who think of food service as a transient line of work should take note of some statistics from the National Restaurant Association:

Why yes I do! I'll post some information on another topic soon.

So beautiful.

Some interesting news today from the Union Square Hospitality Group: Eleven Madison Park will be getting a new chef. Kerry Heffernan, the current chef and a partner in the restaurant, will be shifting over to a new venture from the Union Square Hospitality Group called Hudson Yards Catering. He will stay at Eleven Madison until a new chef is chosen and through the transition, and he will remain a partner in Eleven Madison Park.

I agree. Even if tipping worked, it would be a fundamentally flawed system of substitute compensation. That it doesn't work, however, helps the argument quite a bit.

That's why I don't understand how proponents of tipping have been allowed to drape themselves in the flag of capitalism and free markets, while I get called a pinko on the irate waiter's blog. I mean, my "neoliberal" credentials are absolutely impeccable (anybody else posting here who writes about food politics for Commentary magazine please raise your hand). You want to go to a seriously capitalistic country, go to Singapore. No tipping. The free market, apparently being defended against pinkos like me by people who think Salma when they hear Hayek, would grind to a halt if all services -- medical, sanitation, electrical, legal -- were put on the gratuity system.

Just a semantic point: if anything, a set fee for a service strikes me as more "free market" than an after-the-fact gratuity. Or, as Michael Lynn has said in the Cornell Chronicle, "Tipping is an interesting behavior because tips are voluntary payments given after services have been rendered. Consumers rarely pay more than necessary for goods and services. Tipping represents a multibillion-dollar exception to this general rule."

(Note: yes, I have been trying to get him to participate here; I'll put in a nagging call tonight).

True. I haven't read every one of Lynn's studies, nor have I read all the other studies on tipping that he has studied in his meta-studies, but it's clear that the majority of the data come from the majority types of restaurants relevant to most people when it comes to tipping: casual dining table service places. I'm not aware of studies he has done wherein he isolates fine dining. Well, at least not studies on the tipping-service correlation issue. He does isolate fine dining in some of his ethnicity studies -- now there's a powderkeg we should discuss on another topic and preferably in another universe. What I think is interesting about the extremes of dining, however, is that you find the service charges there: at Per Se, Chez Panisse and Charlie Trotter's, and also at the really cheap places like buffets and "barbecue" (as in roast chicken) restaurants -- that's where you see a lot of fixed service charges, whereas you don't see them in the middle. One thing I'd have to guess -- and this is an educated guess -- is that when you get to the fine dining level you have 1) something like 95% customer satisfaction (this comes from a USA Today poll I saw awhile back) so the tipping variance isn't as much of an issue, 2) a lot more people who are inelastic tippers, 3) nearly universal pooling, and 4) I'd bet a lot that there is one factor -- size of check -- that totally dominates all the other factors in the fine-dining tip-decision matrix.

Thought I should also mention that Chez Panisse has long had a service charge, currently 17%, and Charlie Trotter's has an 18% service charge.

That assumes a single transaction with all payment at the end. But assume an iterated tipping game, such as in a bar. You tip the bartender generously after the first and second drinks in the hopes of getting the third drink comped. That's an inducement (aka a bribe), not a gratuity. Likewise, over the course of multiple visits to a restaurant the line between inducement and gratuity gets blurred. You tip the server well so he'll remember you the next time and give you "better service" (I use this phrase to include what many people mistakenly think is better service). Even in a single-visit situation, you may tip the maitre d' on the way in so that you get a better table and better service. And there are other ways to play the game: you dress really well, you act a certain way, you imply that you're the big-tipping type in the hopes of getting better service. And tipping in advance is only a matter of time, because the bribe is fundamentally more efficient and effective than the gratuity. Already, in other tipped industries it is common to tip in advance. For example, at this point everybody should know to tip moving men in advance of the move -- in other words you should negotiate the bribe up front so they break less of your stuff.

It's not all begging, Jack. Part of it is also bribery.

Rich, there's not much I can do to convince you if you're going to be so truculent in the face of what every expert says based on studies of thousands of customers, restaurants and meals. We're not talking about one study by one person. We're talking about a large body of work. Perhaps you could start by pointing to one expert, one study, one set of data that supports what you're saying. At least then we'd be in the realm of credible disagreement. At this point, you're just insisting that the Earth is flat because anybody can see if you look straight ahead the Earth is obviously flat -- that's your experience and, damn it, you won't be hearing any different from the so-called experts. Furthermore, if the tipping system works so well, why is restaurant service in America so bad? Why is it better in Europe? Why don't countries where they don't have tipping have uniformly bad service? Clearly, the cultural bias that makes so many Americans express the belief that restaurant service would be awful without tipping is patently false when held up against the map of reality.

In the restaurant horserace: 1) the crowd gets to decide after the race is over which jockey to pay, 2) the crowd makes its jockey payment decisions based on numerous factors extraneous to who won the race: weather, charisma, gender, and 3) jockeys randomly get paid more for racing brown horses than for racing black horses, etc. Doesn't sound like a very effective system for encouraging jockeys to win horseraces. The smart jockeys would find pretty horses and do little dances and acrobatics and rope tricks on them in order to get tips from the crowd, while the naive jockeys would win the race and get nothing.

To separate the issues a little, I think we're talking about a few different scenarios: First, there's what happens in Per Se and in other high-end restaurants. Second, there's what happens at middle- and lower-end restaurants (a category that further divides into chains and non-chains). Then, overall, we are talking about, first, service charge scenarios and, second, pure wage scenarios. At Per Se and other high-end restaurants, the minimum wage doesn't really enter into the equation -- waiters are out of that category. Likewise, such places tend to offer health plans already. I think the FICA and other tax issues are relatively minor -- these places do 90+ percent credit card business and cash is pooled and tracked by computer anyway. So the big switch mostly involves the gratuity versus service charge issue in its pure form. If you believe tipping works, that ends the discussion. I believe it has been emphatically proven not to work and to be a bad thing. So I favor the switch to a service charge in this context. As for the middle- and lower-end restaurants, the switch from tipping to a service charge is not particularly related to the healthcare issue. It is only the switch from tipping or the service charge to a real wage system that would trigger those concerns. Although, I hasten to add, plenty of middle-market food service establishments currently provide both living wages and healthcare to their service employees -- so it is definitely not impossible. In fact it's common. Yes, if restaurants that are not currently providing living wages and benefits are suddenly going to do so, they will have to charge more money for food and pay their servers less cash so they can make enough money selling what they sell to pay their employees what their employees need to be paid in order to live now and in the future. In other words, they will have to be real businesses, just like other businesses. It would not bother me in the slightest to pay an extra couple of dollars for every menu item in every restaurant in order to make this happen. Consider it a tip, if it makes you feel better.