Since no one here disagrees that servers should be paid well for good work, I don't understand the complexity of some of the ideas presented.

Doesn't tipping merely remove the middle man, i.e., the restaurant manager, from the equation?

I thought tipping inserted a middle man, i.e. the customer.

You aren't a middle man if you are the recipient of the service, are you?

> You aren't a middle man if you are the recipient of the service, are you?

You're certainly not a middleman if you're the one paying for a service.

Minimum wage in NY is currently $8.75 an hour, but for food service workers, such as wait staff it can be $5.00 an hour because they can earn tips. This covers all restaurants from your local diner to high end ones. That may mean earning $100 a week plus tips. If you work in a lower priced restaurant, the tips are generally not high. For many,its hardly a living wage.

In many European countries where service is included, the wait staff is paid a regular salary. In addition, the restaurant employees have universal health coverage, unlike workers here.

What you pay for a meal does not necessarily translate into a fair wage for the people who work in the restaurants, whether in the dining room or the back of the house.

Minimum wage in NY is currently $8.75 an hour, but for food service workers, such as wait staff it can be $5.00 an hour because they can earn tips. This covers all restaurants from your local diner to high end ones. That may mean earning $100 a week plus tips. If you work in a lower priced restaurant, the tips are generally not high. For many,its hardly a living wage.

In many European countries where service is included, the wait staff is paid a regular salary. In addition, the restaurant employees have universal health coverage, unlike workers here.

What you pay for a meal does not necessarily translate into a fair wage for the people who work in the restaurants, whether in the dining room or the back of the house.

Minimum wage in NY is currently $8.75 an hour, but for food service workers, such as wait staff it can be $5.00 an hour because they can earn tips. This covers all restaurants from your local diner to high end ones. That may mean earning $100 a week plus tips. If you work in a lower priced restaurant, the tips are generally not high. For many,its hardly a living wage.

In many European countries where service is included, the wait staff is paid a regular salary. In addition, the restaurant employees have universal health coverage, unlike workers here.

What you pay for a meal does not necessarily translate into a fair wage for the people who work in the restaurants, whether in the dining room or the back of the house.

For all the talk about waitstaff in Europe being paid "a living wage," I never see anyone post the typical wages of a waiter/waitress there. What are they compared to, say, a schoolteacher?

(Yes, I googled. No, nothing came up.)

Danny Meyer's The Modern Dining Room will convert to the no tipping policy this coming Thursday. We had (a fantastic; highly recommended) dinner there last night and spoke to the stellar wait person (this restaurant has some of the best service in Manhattan, in my opinion) about the coming changes. The current price for a three-course dinner is $98; this will change to $122 on Thursday, so the increase is more than 20%. (They also offer four-course and tasting menus, see menus below)

For a great experience, we usually tip in the range of 20-22%.

There will no longer be a line for tipping on the bill, and the people we spoke to have adopted a wait and see attitude about how the changes would affect the take-home of front of the house staff, while concurring that the back of the house would accrue definite and substantial financial benefits with the new system. I imagine that in a restaurant of this caliber there will be diners that will leave tips, disregarding policy changes.



Current dinner menu:

http://media-cdn.getbento.com/accoun...enu%2011.9.pdf

I have an MA in English and have been to about 40 countries but I don't understand some menus today.

I need clarity over pretense.

>>I have an MA in English<<

There's your first problem.

I hear you on certain menus but the one I posted recently seems pretty straightforward. But maybe you did not mean that one, from The Modern Dining Room.

On some menus, I do not menu I do not half the ingredients, on others I do not know what goes with what, and more than cockroaches in restaurants nothing scares me more then when the server says, "Have you been here before?" That means that are making a simple situation complicated.

<I need clarity over pretense.>
Are those the only two options? What if you simply don't know what an ingredient is? Chefs are constantly expanding their repertoires, and you can always ask what something means, ya know.

Thank you, Newbe, I never would have figured that out on my own.

There are great many menus these days where chefs seem to go out of there way for arcane ingredients, techniques, and combinations.

Sometimes it looks like the ingredients are secondary to one upmanship of other establishments.

You're welcome!

>>On some menus, I do not menu I do not half the ingredients, on others I do not know what goes with what, and more than cockroaches in restaurants nothing scares me more then when the server says, "Have you been here before?"<<

University officials called. They want the MA back.

They can have it.

Here is an article in today's NYTimes about Danny Meyer's The Modern and the new tipping policies, which go into effect tomorrow:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/18/di...ef=dining&_r=0

>>On some menus, I do not menu I do not half the ingredients, on others I do not know what goes with what, and more than cockroaches in restaurants nothing scares me more then when the server says, "Have you been here before?"<<

Apparently one of the recent mystery ingredients was alcohol -- lots of it.