tipping

sometimes i pick up food at a bar/grill place near home and i always tip a few bucks. now, depending on who is working, sometimes i get a free beer while i wait. see, tipping is good for everyone.

lol, pplains. I'm imagining the sizzling sound slowly dying over the course of the car ride home.

"Excuse me, I got my Hot Spicy Mama Extra-Special Fajitas as take out, and once I got home, they weren't sizzling. THEY WEREN'T SIZZLING."

― pplains, Friday, June 21, 2013 9:49 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

You joke, but some dude in our restaurant who was dining in said this once. He complained that the Fajitas stopped sizzling 10 minutes into his meal, and when the waiter explained that they weren't designed to sizzle indefinitely, he complained that "well it doesn't taste the same anymore now". as if the sizzling was some magic candy that gave the meal pop rock flavoring.

But it IS, in a way.

Once at Chili's, my dad was served some fajitas that were acting very quiet. I pointed at them and asked if they were cold, and he said no. But why weren't they sizzling?

The waiter sheepishly explained that there's a special liquid they squirt out of a condiment container to make the fajitas sizzle, albeit artificially.

Everything is a lie.

I bet that special liquid is water.

Haha the sizzling fajitas thing is so weird. Why is it JUST fajitas that get the special sizzle treatment?

xpost it's the tears of those wronged by Fajita sizzle fraud

Haha the sizzling fajitas thing is so weird. Why is it JUST fajitas that get the special sizzle treatment?

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Friday, June 21, 2013 10:13 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

*imagines a plate of hot dogs and fries sizzling*

It's not just fajitas. I've seen it done with steaks and chicken and even once at an Indian restaurant, which was weird. It's basically just a matter of heating up a skillet and dumping liquid onto it, so yeah, like carl agatha said, water or whatever.

I worked at Ruby Tuesday, and they got the fajitas to sizzle by keeping the skillets under a 500-some degree heating element (salamander) and tossing the meat and veggies on at the last second. They would sizzle so much that the vapors would trigger the fire alarms at least half the time, and mall security would have to come reset them.

xp- no water at Ruby's, just juices

A quick internet search says it's not water, but "sizzle sauce."

Kinda wish I hadn't gone internet searching.

Hey it's important, the sizzle is fucking important y'all

I hate living in this world where GIS results for "sizzle sauce" are suprisingly tame.

It makes sense for there to be a lime juice component in sizzle sauce.

pretty common at indian restaurants ime

there are a bunch of classic chinese dishes that do the sizzle, you wanna look for the prefix 铁板 which means metal plate

or dolsot bibimbap

only time i get takeout from a real sit-down restaurant is when i'm alone and craving pad se ew and you're damn right i'm never going to eat alone at a sit-down restaurant

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/food-for-men/why-tipping-should-be-illegal-15603180

food-for-men

I know, right.

a must-read from world's worst movie blogger (comments esp)

http://www.hollywood-elsewhere.com/2013/06/punishment/#disqus_thread

expert trolling. he knows his audience.

must be bad at it when even the internet commenters won't blindly follow his beck and call.

http://jayporter.com/dispatches/observations-from-a-tipless-restaurant-part-1-overview/

good read. i assumed this revive would be about drew brees.

thanks, that was great.

Now, let’s say that on a typical shift, a restaurant sells $1000 in food and drink. It would be reasonable that, to make that revenue, a restaurant has 2 cooks who work 8 hours each, a dishwasher who works 8 hours, and two servers who work 6 hours each. We can extrapolate from standard industry models that, of the $1000 in sales, there will be $300 available to cover the 36 hours of labor. It just so happens that this math means that everyone in the house will make $8/hour, which is of course both minimum wage and a poverty wage. But that’s just how the pie divides.

And yet, wait! We’ve forgotten something. There are also 220 extra dollars paid by the guests as tips. (This 22% is typical for restaurants like ours in San Diego — the exact amount will change with restaurant style and location.) This tip money could add another $6/hour to everyone’s wage, getting everyone up to $14/hr. While $14/hr isn’t enough to live well in San Diego, it starts approaching realistic money.

However, to give the tip money to every worker would be illegal. The law is historically very clear — the $220 in tips belongs to the two servers only, and cannot be distributed to any other employees. So, the two servers make a total of about $26/hour each, while everyone else in the restaurant is stuck at $8/hour.

Great read so far.

in my mind, tipping is directly responsible for yelp culture

Yeah, I had intense Yelp-related thoughts on reading this:

Our most transgressive act was refusing to allow our guests to pay our servers anything more beyond the service charge — this is where the angry came out. A certain small number of very vocal men (and it was always men) resented that we were not letting them try to exercise additional control over our team members. This was true even though compelling research has shown that servers do not adjust quality of service as a result of tips; instead the idea that the restaurant was not offering our servers up as objects of control, was heresy. For these people, the primary service they wanted from the restaurant was the opportunity to pay for favors from the server — much like the patron at a strip club pays the club for the opportunity to dangle bills in front a dancer for individual attention. The idea that a restaurant could legitimately want to be in a different business than a strip club, was not an idea these guests could countenance. Thus, I was ever subject to witty takedowns like you are a douche, along with other well-thought-out gems.

it's otm but i think dude really overestimates how much servers make especially in $2.13/hr environments. have never been a server tho so

Depends seriously on the restaurant. I imagine that an upscale farm-to-table operation probably has bigger checks than the Holiday Inn restaurants I used to work at.

At a bar in London last night they had a tip jar. Had never seen that in my limited time here. I threw all my change in it. No idea how much it was but it was probably a lot because people keep giving me these 1 and 2 pound coins.

Maybe things are very different in California than states where I've waited tables (and conducted workers' rights workshops), but based on my experience, these statements are wrong:

Because tips cannot legally, in most cases, be controlled by the employer, they are typically distributed (or not distributed, as the case may be) according to a social compact between the employees. That social compact is either unenforced or enforced through social means, like ostracization. In either event, the systems for both acquiring and distributing tips are easily gamed by members of the compact who are intent on doing so.

However, to give the tip money to every worker would be illegal. The law is historically very clear — the $220 in tips belongs to the two servers only, and cannot be distributed to any other employees.

Tipped employees can't be required to share tips w/ management, but tipping out bussers, expediters, runners, and even dishwashers, is legal and normal.

It's a small point, but so much of his point of view hinges on it.

Not that his model of 86'ing tips and paying a fair wage to all isn't pretty great.

"86'ing" oooooh, look at you mr. restaurant jargon.

Clever, no?

And his ideas of how tip-outs work is strange. IME, tip-outs are invariably based on sales, not tips received. The stingy waiter, withholding tip-outs, under-declaring tips is not very realistic.

it depends on how things are structured - a friend worked in a place that had tip-pooled and people would def underreport their tips at the end of the night by holding cash back or w/e. cases where you tip on out sales are more transparent but also less fair because the server ends up paying out of pocket for customers that stiff them

parts 3 + 4 of that blog post are out now btw

By perpetuating the idea that servers, and servers alone, won’t perform without the threat of pay withheld, we dehumanize our neighbors and peers who work taking care of us. I think this helps us not feel bad when we sometimes treat them badly. It’s the Stanford Prison Experiment meets Yelp.

"It’s the Stanford Prison Experiment meets Yelp."

New board description?

Thing I read the other day: tip your sommelier for 20% the amount of the wine, if it was an awesome recommendation and went well with your meal. I'm glad I never drink wine.

It's been nice, for the last two weeks I've done no tipping other than occasionally rounding up to the nearest pound/euro.

cases where you tip on out sales are more transparent but also less fair because the server ends up paying out of pocket for customers that stiff them

This is true, but it's made up for by making the percentage of sales-based tip-out correlate to a server's average take (say, 15% tips as opposed to being stiffed or 25%).

Works the same way as income tax based on imputed tip wages - some nights you make $100 in tips but pay taxes on $150, some nights it's the other way around.

Anyway caek OTM. Abolish tipping and bring on fair wages for restaurant workers.

It's been nice, for the last two weeks I've done no tipping other than occasionally rounding up to the nearest pound/euro.

― Jeff,

ey mang welcome 2 civilisation

there are plenty of folk who work in well-performing restaurants that would consider a base 'living wage' to be a pay cut.

I can see where for some waiters, who are working in slower restaurants (as I did), or ones that have lower ticket averages might benefit from it, but it would also make those nights of bringing home several hundred bucks or getting a surprise $50 tip from a dude throwing a party go bye-bye.

Yeah, there's lots here that doesn't apply to every restaurant, every state/municipality etc. But I just did some serious fuck-yeah nodding to Part 3, which lingers on a study showing the common-sense fact that given the choice between increasing quality of service and increasing number of his/her individual covers (at the expense of quality of service, or even quantity of food/drinks sold!), an economically rational server will choose the latter, since any lost tip revenue is almost immediately cancelled out by having turned over more checks. Meanwhile the customer is giving up on ordering dessert since the server is off doing something else, but whatever.

there are plenty of folk who work in well-performing restaurants that would consider a base 'living wage' to be a pay cut.

Definitely. The waiters at the place I last waited tables are making more than I am 7 years later. Plus service charges would be a pretty tempting target for cuts in order to lower prices.

OTOH, I don't recall if this guy says how much he is paying his staff, but the no-tipping sushi place in NY claimed they were paying "market" wages for waiters, i.e., $20-something/hour. A waiter in an upscale place could certainly make a lot more on a good night, but on average, $20-something/hour is not bad in exchange for the steadiness of the income.

Yesterday I tipped $9 on $46.22 and then felt bad abt it