Dark Meat — Here's a Tip

The young man and woman were obviously excited when they took their seats at a table near the front of the restaurant. Endearing, and a touch awkward, they giggled their way through their dining experience, choosing a plate or two from every section of the menu. I should have guessed they were back-of-house. For one, they didn’t really drink. Not like a server would have. Or even a chef. Not only that, but they seemed to naturally know their way around a menu that could easily trip guests up on its obscure language and unique ingredients.

But the dead giveaway should have been their semi-serious debate about the respective qualities of two apple pies: one from Harvey’s and the other from McDonald’s. The apple pie I set down in front of them was of a different class entirely and they joked about how it might measure up. I smirked, and encouraged their playful scrutiny with a bit of banter, feeling somewhat sympathetic to their obvious affinity for fastfood, a telling sign of cooks short on time and equally short on funds.

After they paid their bill, I was returning with their change when I overhead them strike up a conversation with a few guests at a nearby table, who asked them how they enjoyed the food. I listened in as they described every nuanced detail of the dishes in detail, in a way that I found impressive and enviable. At that point, I was compelled to ask if they worked in the industry. When they both began rattling off several familiar kitchens (I’m quite sure I heard places such as Town and Restaurant E18hteen among the list), I couldn’t help but feel like an asshole. It was too late to offer them an industry discount on their bill, which I would have if I had, or one of the other staff, recognized them. But the sad fact is that those who file in the kitchen ranks are often the most invisible. Gushing with gratitude, they turned to leave and I set about clearing off their table. That’s when I counted the remaining change and discovered that, just to make matters worse, they had left me a huge tip.

I suddenly felt a bit sick. Had a server, or maybe a successful chef, left something so generous, I would have been grateful. But when it comes from kitchen staff, it only feels dirty, like accepting the last crumbs of a starving person while you tuck into a feast of foie gras. I thought of how dedicated kitchen staff chose to spend their hardearned income: hundreds and thousands of dollars spent on knives, cookbooks, unaffordable dinners out to stay abreast of cutting-edge cuisine, expensive and time-consuming culinary courses; only to wind up in a job that barely pays a whisper above minimum wage (if at all). Whereas I hadn’t so much as paid for my corkscrew.

Corey Mintz often writes about the state of pay in the back-of-house. He is quick to lay the blame of low wages on owners who simply refuse to offer reasonable compensation and the arrogant chefs who encourage “misplaced pride” in their culinary hopefuls. Cooks, the prolific food industry critic and former cook wrote, will often find themselves in positions where they are put on daily salaries, often dropping their hourly rate down below even the minimum, convinced that their on-the- job kitchen experience is worth the dehumanizing paycheque.

“If you’re a decent person,” Mintz argues, “you can pay people fairly under any mechanism.” But, as anyone who operates a restaurant or food business will tell you, paying people more than the minimum takes more than just good intentions. The money to increase wages has to come from somewhere and most small- and medium-sized business owners aren’t paying themselves enough to take anymore off the top. And it doesn’t matter which side of the table you are on, everyone will be left with a bad taste in their mouth if menu prices go up.

And what of the front-of-house? At the dead-end of the wage scale, servers working in a licenced establishment in Ontario make $12.20 per hour, which is less than minimum wage. But there is little doubt that it stops them from coming out on top.

When later that evening I collected my tips from a previous night’s work, I let out a short gasp that caught the attention of a fellow server. “Everything ok?” he asked, while I recounted the stack of $20 and $50 bills for a second time. “This is criminal,” I said to him, equally elated and unsettled by the sum. He shrugged it off. “We work hard,” he said, matter-of-factly, “You earned that.”

I couldn’t deny that the work was hard, even gruelling at times. The exhausting relay of waiting tables; the improvised choreography that keeps a dining room thrumming its way through the night is nothing short of art, when done right. I headed out the door, but not before glancing into the open kitchen. It felt like peering into a starving artist’s studio, watching them toil away at the razor’s edge of exhaustion, another hour or two ahead of them to wrap up yet another 12-hour day. (I recall one cook that I used to work with doing a pirouette after he punched out after long punishing dinner service. “Only 17 hours today!” he cheered. I laughed, but not without pity, knowing full well that he would probably do another 17 hours again the next day.)

Here I was, already on my way home after an enviably short seven-hour shift. I said goodnight to the dishwasher and the remaining cooks and walked out into the night with a pocket full of off-the-books cash burning a hole in my pocket. But that night I felt a sour taste invade my mouth. Why had I “earned” all that dough and not them? Sure, they would see a small percentage of the overall take — upwards of three to four per cent of total sales, in some cases — but in restaurants where the average tip hovers around the 20 per cent mark, meant that servers, like me, would end up with far more than our fair share.

But is the answer to our wage disparities simply to ditch the tip? Hugh Morris, a travel writer for The Telegraph, who recently wrote of his perplexing experience dining in the U.S., seems to think so. “On more than several occasions across a trip that entailed more than a dozen dining experiences, the service was below average — surly, disinterested and slapdash — yet, because of the culture, I still felt obliged to tip 20 per cent... Perhaps it is against the laissez-faire blood that runs through the veins of American economic philosophy, but I would fully support the introduction of a Manhattan living wage that could do away with the pressure of tipping staff left, right and centre for every visit to the bar. The current system is rotten,” he wrote. Rewarding bad service with a good tip is one thing; doing away with tips completely is another matter altogether, one that will result in people paying more for food, so servers can, at the very least, earn a minimum wage. And servers will make less money. A lot less money.

And cooks? They also stand to lose their tips, however small the portion. It’s a tough call. On one hand, what servers make compared to their often more highly trained counterparts is borderline revolting (even more revolting is the entitlement attitude that often goes along with it). But is ripping money from the hands of those who are actually making a decent living — say, anywhere from $50,000 to $80,000 a year — simply a race for the lowest common denominator in an industry with standards already hovering perilously near the bottom?

There’s little chance the food industry, notorious for low profit margins and intense labour demands, would wind up in a position to pay all of staff on par with a thriving server. Not only that, tipping culture has vastly distorted the wage structure of the service class and skewed the public’s perception of value when it comes to hospitality. It keeps the chasm between the back and front of house widening, where it’s getting harder and harder to ignore that herd of well-heeled elephants stomping around the dining room, especially if you're watching from your perch in the kitchen.

I can’t help but notice when I find myself in conversations with chefs and cooks about what the future of service will look like, the one eerily distinct similarity that their dream restaurants share. “No servers,” they say flatly. It’s an interesting thought — and why not? While having your plate dropped off by the same person that cooked it won’t necessarily mean you won’t leave a tip, it would mean that the spoils will wind up more evenly distributed. Finally, cooks will reap some of the financial benefits that the front-of-house has long enjoyed, instead of watching them show up after they do, leave before they do, and walk away with at least twice as many earnings as they do.

Considering an industry shake-up is already well underway — with the breakdown of the kitchen brigade; the #metoo scandals launching women to the front of the line; the deafening warning bells of an ongoing mental health and substance abuse crisis — it seems now might be the perfect time to throw the entire service model onto the flames and let it burn along with the rest of our broken and inequitable system. Does that mean that tipping culture is set to disappear? Probably not. But it would behoove those of us in the front-of-house who benefit the most from that culture to start naming our privilege and question the disparities that our take-home reinforces. It’s time to evolve, and above all, to figure out how to share. If someone on a cook’s salary can leave a big tip, then surely there is a better way to pay it forward than just sending it into another server’s already plush pocket.