Service fee replacing tips at New York eatery

Thursday, August 18, 2005

Wire reports

New York- Is the right to stiff the waiter as American as apple pie?

Thomas Keller, chef at the extravagantly priced Per Se restaurant in the Time Warner Center in Manhattan, does not think so. Indeed, he is dropping the tip system next month and replacing it with a flat service fee of 20 percent.

He is trying an approach that chefs and restaurant managers say has never caught on in this country for a simple reason: American diners relish the power of the tip to reward or punish their servers, and the servers want them to have it.

Per Se's customers might not balk. After all, they have been begging for a chance to pay $175 or more for a single dinner there - and on average, they tip at a rate of 22 percent.

But Keller might face a mutiny among his waiters, who might not stand still for his plan to divert a larger portion of the service charge to the people in the kitchen. He said he already had lost one talented young cook and that another had asked to become a waiter temporarily so that he could pay some bills.

Under the new plan, the waiters and all the other employees will earn steady wages, even for weeks when the restaurant is closed. He said the system worked well for seven years at the French Laundry, his restaurant in Yountville, Calif., which charges 19 percent for service.

But Danny Meyer, owner of Union Square Cafe in Manhattan, said some waiters want to preserve their chances of raking in some really big tips.

"What I heard was that the incentive that a tip provides really energizes the servers to go perform," he said.

Diners seem to notice, said Tim Zagat, chief executive of the Zagat Survey. About 80 percent of people surveyed say they prefer to decide how much to tip their servers, he said.

They reserve the discretion to give a very big tip or no tip at all, though they rarely do either, he said. Three out of four respondents say they have never left nothing, and the average tip has been rising steadily, he said. The average amount diners said they left last year was 18.6 percent, up from about 16 percent in the early 1990s, he said.