TheFoodTutor

Mr. Tutor is a she, by the way. ← Thanks for clearing that up. This is one thing that I've found a little problematic. I have worked in places that charge for refills on coke, and I currently work in a place that does not charge for refills. I've observed lots and lots of customers and am very, very familiar with a wide range of tipping habits - I work in a very busy restaurant - and this is almost universally the behavior I see: For 1 beverage with 4 refills in the place that charges $2 each time, tab = $10 and tip on that portion of the tab = $2 (if the person is a 20% tipper.) For 1 beverage with 4 refills in a place that doesn't charge for refills, tab = $2 and tip on that portion of the tab = 40 cents (if the person is a 20% tipper.) Both tables were exactly the same amount of work, but one tip is significantly higher. I'm not giving an opinion on this, and it really doesn't matter if I do, because that's simply the way people behave. People tip on what appears on the bill, end of story.

Unfortunately, while that seems like a nice idea, it isn't really true. Most of the servers with whom I work are very, very professional, they treat every table exactly the same (with perhaps the exception of the regular who comes in every day and gets his iced tea delivered before he sits down) and we provide consistently good service to everyone. But let me tell you, about the umpteenth time you've heard someone say, "Thank you so much for the excellent service!" "Wow! You're the best waitress, ever!" "Service was superb! Let me drop a note to the manager." at the same time as the person is handing you a tip that is just under 10% of their bill, which does not reflect their water with lemon, hot water with lemon, or the lemonade they made at their table with their sugar caddy, then you know it's them and not you. Really, try waiting tables for a while and you will see. As far as tip jars at counters, I really don't like this practice any more than anyone else does. I see no reason to drag fast food workers into the classification of tipped profession, since we already have enough people working for tips. In my opinion, it's really not the best way to pay people for their work. As far as free refills on any type of beverage other than water, I really don't see what the point is. Generally, when I eat in restaurants, I'm drinking beer or wine anyway. On the rare occasion that I have a soda or another beverage, I'm fine with just one. If I'm really thirsty, I can drink water. But if free refills on non-alcoholic beverages is something that's important to you, I'd recommend that you patronize establishments that provide them and avoid those that don't. In my experience, this is the decision of the owner of the business, and I'm sure they'll notice if people start staying away in droves because of the lack of free refills.

Oh my god! Have you been reading my mind or something? Hot water with lemon is a guaranteed huge amount of work with nothing added to the check, and the sorts of people who order it are definitely not going to tip any amount on anything for which you don't charge. At the restaurant where I currently work, while it doesn't happen often, if I have two ladies who order hot water with lemon, that means I must make two trips to the table just to process their uncharged beverage orders without being able to provide beverages to the rest of the table! Never, ever, ever have I seen people tip on this uncharged expense to the restaurant, plus the amount of work the server must do. In fact, an order of hot water with lemon, if it comes from the person who's paying the tab, almost guarantees that you'll get, at the most, a 12% tip for exemplary service, above and beyond the normal call of duty. 12% on the tab charged, of course, not including running to get them more hot water and lemons for their free beverage. If it's just a matter of someone living in the hot, hot South and being thirsty, I'll provide all the water you want to quench your thirst. We even provide free filtered water at the restaurant where I work, poured chilled from the filtering mechanism in chilled glasses. So it's really not a matter of people being thirsty because it's hot, especially if they're ordering hot water with lemon in the middle of a Georgia July. Actually, I really don't get it at all. If someone would explain the whole "ordering hot water with lemon while it's 110 degrees outside" phenomenon, I'd be really, really glad to hear it.

Well said. The only way for a restaurant to not charge tax on items that are comped is to not ring the item in the first place and put the cost of that item in the food or liquor columns of their monthly budget. Comps and voids do take a slightly different tack, but I can explain that. If a restaurant serves you a filet that you ordered medium-rare, but it arrives well-done, and there is not enough time for a new dish to be prepared to replace the one that was wrong, the restaurant takes a loss not only on the food cost of that item, but they also remove the tax from your bill, because that's what's fair. You were unable to eat the food, so there's no way you should have to pay for the tax on that sale. The business owner eats the whole cost, but hopefully you will remember if your server did the best he or she could in serving the dish to you, and remember that when you tip. But if the business sells you a steak on a different night, and you like it and you are happy with the way everything is prepared, but part of the tender you offer as payment is a coupon for a free steak, why should the owner pay the sales tax on that steak for you? You ate the steak, enjoyed it, and you got it for free, so why would you put the business owner in the position of paying the tax on it as well? Hopefully, you got exactly what you ordered, plus you got a discounted meal, and the owners, the cooks, and the servers all did exactly the same amount of work as they would have if you were any other customer, except for the fact that they took off the charge for that entree. The general rule is that you should always pay any fees related to the original price of purchase, regardless of what the discounted amount you should have to pay turns out to be. That includes tax and tip.

I made toasted pumpkin seeds with cumin, and this is what I did with the leftovers: Hee hee. The pumpkin seeds are mighty tasty.

I agree with glenn about the difficulty in implementation. There are two ways that you could mandate that servers pool all of their tips up to 15%: You can ask servers to voluntarily police themselves and trust that they will chip in an accurate amount that reflects all the tips they received up to 15%. However, in many reporting situations, I know of servers who will automatically claim any discretionary, or cash tips, down to 10%, so one can assume they will do so for the purpose of pooling as well. And there's also the nice option of pocketing your tip and telling everyone that this table stiffed you. Or you can mandate that every server chip in 15% of their sales, assuming that most tables will tip 15%, and the server can skim the top range between 15-20%, based on your assumption that those are tips the server earned for going above and beyond. Of course, this will unduly punish people who legitimately do get stiffed, because on top of receiving zero tip, they will have to contribute 15% of that sale to the tip pool in exchange for their portion of the tip pool in return. Incidentally, I don't really agree with the assumption that basic service receives 15%, and people generally increase the tip based on the quality of service. Based on my observation of tipping behavior, I know that some people are 15% no matter what, unless they receive appalling service and stiff the server entirely. And people who regularly tip 20% continue to do so even if there are minor dips in the quality of their service. And of course there are some people who tip 10% no matter what.

Coffee with heavy cream and splenda, ice water and. . . Foie gras with toast points, peach preserves and creamy scrambled eggs. My favorite breakfast, actually. My boyfriend brought home some leftover foie gras from work, which seems like some kind of weird oxymoron. How does one have "leftover" foie gras? Well, these are some of the little end pieces that don't make a perfect restaurant slice. They still taste pretty darned good, though.

That's just the sort of information that's valuable to put into a review, isn't it?

You're kidding me, right? You must not have waited tables in a long, long time, or possibly ever. "don't really have to do much to earn a 15% tip." That statement really boggles my mind. Do you know how many people I've waited on who feel it's perfectly acceptable, right, noble and normal to leave someone a tip of $3 on a tab of $75? Do you know how many people feel that the 20% rule only applies up to the point where the tip equals $20, even if we're talking about an $800 tab for a party of 20? Do you know how many people find out at the end of their meal that they don't have enough money to pay their entire bill, much less tip their server, so they leave a pile of wadded up cash, $10 short of what they owe on the table with a hurried, "Thanks for the great service. Bye!" as they run out the door? How about the guy who only eats out once a year, takes his whole family out for dinner and racks up a $100 tab and then proudly, his face beaming with pleasure, places a $5 bill on the table while saying to the waitress, "There's your teee-yup!" Heck, I've even been stiffed by a person who worked for the same fine dining company that I worked for, simply because her employer gave her a $15 gift certificate, but it was the sort of gift certificate that you can't use for the tip or taxes, and that was all she handed me for her $13 and change bill as she ducked out the door. "don't really have to do much to earn a 15% tip." I keep looking at that statement, and I just can't believe it. I work in an area where people tip very well compared to the national average, but I have seen some truly appalling behavior as far as tipping.

The sheer poetry of this statement brought tears to my eyes! ← Thank you so much. Bitterness does seem to inspire a lot of fairly good writing. I write a blog about the things I go through every day as a waitress in ghetto-fabulous Buckhead, Atlanta, Georgia. I apologize, beforehand, for pimping my writing on eGullet., and I hope the Perlows and Fat Guy don't kick me off this website for doing so.

It has dramatically increased the number of hits I receive on my website, and at the same time it has kept me from doing some important things, because I just want to stick around and read a few more posts. So I guess you can say that it has simultaneously made me both more and less productive. Really, I find it to be a terrific resource. It's the first place I look to find information about unusual ingredients or a wide variety of ethnic foods. It's also very relaxing that everyone here is not a food snob and people engage in realistic discussions on everything from haute cuisine to mushy white bread.

I really don't see anything devious in that particular example. Quoted prices and menu listings differ from what's in the computer frequently because the price went up, but one thing was updated without updating the other. We raised the price of the filet mignon on our menu from $25 to $26, and although it was listed correctly on our printed menu, the price stayed at the old, lower amount in the computer until I brought it up to a certain manager 3 times. In this case, the waitstaff is under the impression that this item is $8.50, probably because it was sold for that price at one point, but the price has changed. When the server went to check the price, he either pretended to check and didn't do it, or he checked by looking at a list of prices that hadn't been updated correctly. From the tone of some of the responses on this thread, it sounds as if there's a general perception that servers and restaurant owners spend lots of time trying to think up ways of scamming people. I feel it's important to note that patrons try to scam restaurants at least as often, and probably more frequently than the other way around. A couple of weeks ago, I waited on a couple of ladies, one of whom drank lemonade with her meal. She asked for a second glass of lemonade, and because the two ladies were deep in conversation, I didn't interrupt them to point out that refills aren't free. When they got the bill, they were unhappy over the charge, and I fetched a manager for them. When the manager spoke to the women, she recognized them from another one of our restaurants, where they had made exactly the same complaint. Their ploy was to notify us that all of our other locations gave free refills on lemonade (which they don't) and that she couldn't have possibly known that we didn't give free refills. After the manager confirmed that she would not remove the charge for the lemonade, having recognized the ladies, they waited for her to leave the table. At this time, the lady paying the bill wrote what would have been an 18% tip on the line - more than she probably would have tipped me if everything had gone perfectly - and then scratched through the tip with big black marks from my pen. So even though there was no possible way for me to have given her a free refill - I don't get free lemonade, either - she decided to express her anger by giving me a zero tip. Now, because I pay tipshare and taxes on tips I receive, or theoretically receive, that means that I paid money out of my pocket for waiting on these ladies. I paid for the privilege of running to get them more ketchup, and then running again to get the honey mustard, which of course they didn't mention when they sent me to fetch the first thing, and then running to get more things that they didn't mention the first 2 times they sent me running. . . But that's OK, because one day these ladies will be rotting in the eternal flames of Hell, and I'm pretty sure they don't have free refills on lemonade there, either.

I'm originally from Ohio, and I've travelled around the country a good bit, and I think of free refills on sodas and iced tea as a generally American casual restaurant phenomenon, rather than a uniquely Southern thing. All of the casual restaurant companies for which I've worked provided bottomless glasses of sodas in their locations throughout the states, presumably excluding those in New York City. What I do think of as uniquely Southern, as far as restaurant beverage service, is the option of having your iced tea sweetened or unsweet. Thankfully, the restaurant in which I work does not provide this option.

I live in Atlanta, and I work at a restaurant that gives away quite a lot of stuff for free, aside from refills on sodas, actually. I kind of wish that we charged for extra sides of salad dressing and a few other things that routinely get wasted by customers who ask for them and then don't touch them. I am aware that New York City doesn't give free refills on anything, and that restaurants are generally a lot more expensive there than practically anywhere else in the country. Personally, since I've worked at Emeril's restaurant here in Atlanta, and I've seen glasses of champagne and various wines that were priced at $25, so I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find out that a glass of champagne at the most expensive restauirant in New York would be $42. The $25 edamame would be a shocker, though. $25 for beans?

What's more pleasant is that you live in a country outside the United States, where free refills are not the norm. We offer endless free refills on iced tea and fountain sodas, and when I say "endless," I mean an additional 800-1,000 calories worth of sodas added to the average persons meal. Seriously, my shoe leather would erode a lot less quickly if buying a coke meant simply getting one coke. It's the difference in policy between fountain drinks and freshly-squeezed lemonade where I run into a problem. I think I'm just going to start telling people we're out of lemonade so that I don't sell any more of it. Fat Guy, that was an absolutely brilliant post. It was a joy to read.

guajolote, if I promise to kiss your big, pink posterior, will you stop heckling the blogger?

How can you not like rare duck? Or squid and octopus, for that matter? Yumm. I don't know about the chicken sashimi, since I haven't had it, but I have a feeling I'd like it a lot. Arielle: I like chupa chups, too. But I usually don't get to have more than one lick. I buy them for my cat and he licks them down to little nubs. It takes about 10 minutes or so, but he likes them so much that I feel it's worth it to sit there and hold the stick for him. And processed cheese is probably one of the grossest things around. Except for canned peas, of course.

Not to start an argument, but I'd like to persuade you to instead speak to a manager and ask if the charge for whatever it is that you assumed would be free or very cheap could be removed from your bill. This has been an issue on a few message boards I've visited, and many people have presented situations that fall into 2 categories: Those where the server is knowingly trying to pad a patron's bill in order to increase his or her tip and those where the server is merely doing his or her job correctly, but a perception of being shafted comes through on the guest's part. While I am a server, and I do not engage in the first behavior, I am aware that it does happen. It's actually extremely common in high end fine dining establishments, the example of a new bottle of water being opened at meal's end being very typical. If this happened to me, I would simply state to the server that I didn't ask for another bottle of water and I will not pay for one. If there was a problem with that, I'd speak to a manager. But then, there are situations where a patron visits a fine dining restaurant, not realizing that it's the standard not to offer free refills on coke at certain types of places. Fine dining servers are used to patrons generally being aware that refills aren't free, and it's considered rude and disruptive to the sequence of service to interrupt a fine dining patron who asks for another coke to blurt out, "Y'all know those ain't free, don'cha?" or something similar. While I don't drink coke at white tablecloth restaurants, if I did find myself confronted with charges for refills that I didn't expect, or any other unusual charge, I'd explain to a manager that I was unhappy about that charge. In my experience, managers are pretty good at removing these charges from the bill, so there's really no need to take it out on the server unless you feel certain that the server had been trying to trick you. I am having some difficulty lately with people not understanding that we don't give free refills on our freshly-squeezed lemonade. It's very expensive for us to make and labor intensive, and it makes perfect sense to me that we charge by the glass for it, but some people don't seem to get it. I've been trying to handle this situation by, on removing the empty glass, asking, "Would you like to *order* another lemonade, or can I bring you some water instead?" I make sure that I state the word *order* very, very clearly while making eye contact, and so I didn't think it would be also necessary to add, on receiving an affirmative response, that there will be a subsequent charge for another lemonade. I have several horrible stories related to this unfortunate situation. I'm thinking of printing up business cards that read, "There are no free refills on lemonade!" so that I can hand them to guests, just to make absolutely sure that they understand.

We are getting a Fat Burger here in Atlanta! It's going in a spot in a strip mall where there was once a KFC, which they tore down to build a combo KFC/Taco Bell, and then that went out of business. We were driving by the location, and I saw the Coming Soon! sign, and I pointed it out to my boyfriend with some excitement. He looked at me as if I were crazy, because he just didn't understand why I would think that would be a neat development. Well, I am crazy, but I just think it's cool whenever I get to try something new.

That's funny. There's a Johnny Rockets within walking distance of my apartment, and I think it's a huge ripoff as far as a $5+ burger. My boyfriend likes to get a shake there, and if he's hungry he'll get a burger, too, but then he remembers how crappy their burgers are and realizes he's wasted his money yet again. But yes, I'd agree with the idea that Johnny Rockets and Steak and Shake are the same level of burger. Personally, if I'm ordering a burger that I cannot get cooked to my specified temperature, either because the patty is too thin to be cooked mid-rare or because the meat quality is not high enough, I'll just go to Wendy's where they have burgers for as little as a dollar. I won't have someone waiting on me there, but I'd rather not feel obligated to tip a server when I'm eating at that level anyway. In and Out Burger is a very well-respected chain that does seem to be more along the lines of Holly's standards. Too bad they only have them in 3 states.

Um, I only see a few hash browns in the above pic. I do see a few hash tans and a heck of a lot of hash whites. Thanks for sharing, though. Very interesting foodblog.

That is an interesting point regarding the difference in the price of a burger from one location to the next. My perception of the cost of doing business is tainted, because I live in an area where the cost of living is quite high, and the cost of running a restaurant is exceptionally high, with a very strong chance of failing. So to me, a $10 burger, given Holly's stated standards, doesn't seem unreasonable. The burger at Houston's is $9, so after tax and tip it's well over $10, and even at that, the restaurant doesn't make much money on it. In fact, if beef prices are running particularly high, they may be taking a loss by selling it, after you figure in all the labor, food cost and other operating costs. They sell the burger anyway, of course, hoping you'll wash it down with a beer or a glass of wine. I appreciate Holly's nostalgia for the days when people in fast food really cared about their jobs, and I did manage fast food myself for a while. For me, caring about my job meant working well over 80 hours a week, losing 14 pounds and landing in the hospital. This probably also has to do with the area where I live, but since this is where I am, I can only conclude that running a sandwich shop with high standards is not economically feasible for me in this location at this time.

Houston's does have a good burger, but it's $9 at many locations, and it's $13 at the ones in California.

I would say that Steak & Shake costs considerably more money, as far as getting a burger and fries, than McDonald's. I haven't been to one in a little while, but I seem to remember paying $6-7 for entrees, plus tax and tip, when I go to Steak & Shake, while McD's has a range of items on their $1 value menu - one of the reasons why they have enough business to not shut down hundreds of their stores. One way S & S can afford to provide more service and a (somewhat) higher-quality product is that, aside from charging higher prices, they have a good portion of their workforce whom they only have to pay $2.13 per hour, relying on tips for the rest of their income. McDonald's must pay all their employees minimum wage, or probably more if they don't want to have the absolute dregs of the employment pool. Personally, I don't think of Steak & Shake as being anywhere close to the standards Holly described. They're burgers are mediocre at best, and I can't think of any food items on their menu that I'd describe as "tasty." The service is horrid at most times, and I find it a generally unpleasant place to eat. The servers I know who now work or have worked for the company say that the organization treats its employees like crap and any server worth his or her salt will go work somewhere better after enduring it for a couple months. I work in a restaurant that does serve hand-cut fries, freshly ground hamburgers and gives the sort of service described above. However, we charge $9 for our burger with fries, and even at that, it's a darned good thing we serve a lot of other stuff, because the profit on burgers is definitely not what keeps us afloat. Just MHO.

Sorry to disagree with you, but what you'd actually have is a restaurant that a) charged at least 10 bucks for a hamburger or b) was losing money hand over fist. The cost of running a restaurant and the amount of competition around aren't close to what they were like in the 60s. There are plenty of options for better quality hamburgers and fries, with better service and cleaner dining rooms, but people simply don't want to pay that much for a fast food hamburger. I see restaurants such as the one you described go out of business every day in my city. McDonald's is exactly the way it is because that's what the public dictates. They want a $1 McValue menu, and they are willing to sacrifice good service, cleanliness and even health codes to get it.