🕒 11.5 min read

While tipping in still not a common practice in many countries (e.g. China, Japan. Other countries such as Italy, Jamaica, Maldives, Switzerland include it in the bill), it’s been entrenched in North American hospitality for decades - despite being a contentious issue for many reasons, namely who receives them and how they’re distributed.

Toronto restaurant owners have tried to pull the plug on tipping a few times. In November 2015, restaurateur Hemant Bhagwani - currently of Amaya, Goa, Good Karma, Oye, and Pōpa - enforced a no-tipping policy at his Indian Street Food Co. on Bayview. In its place, a 12 per cent administrative fee was charged on every bill, and ten per cent of the restaurant’s revenue set aside for employee wages. The protocol was also extended to his Thornhill resto, The Fat Beet.

The experiment didn’t last long. Despite his good intentions, customers still wanted to leave a tip, so the restaurant quickly returned to common gratuity practices (Bhagwani has since sold the restaurant, and The Fat Beet shut down shortly after opening). Bill Sweete, owner of Little Italy’s Sidecar and Toronto Temperance Society also eradicated tipping. Sidecar, “Toronto’s first gratuity free restaurant,” was open approximately eight years when he made the switch on May 1, 2016. but reinstated it shortly thereafter. The restaurant shuttered last year, as did TTS.

Leading the charge

More recently, co-owners/chefs of Richmond Station, Ryan Donovan and Carl Heinrich installed a no-tipping protocol. Initiated July 2020, months after the pandemic struck, the restaurant, moved to a program they’re calling Hospitality Included. Instead of a service charge at the end of the bill, menu prices were increased 18 per cent, and that is being distributed as wages. The change comes approximately eight years after opening, but Donovan and Heinrich say they “took significant steps in 2016 to rearrange how cash gratuities were distributed.” Their goal is “to become part of the Ontario Living Wage program.” Note: Tipping is available however, if you place your order on a number of third-party delivery apps.

Other Toronto restaurants quickly followed in their wake. Ten, another finer dining restaurant, this one with just ten seats, announced on August 6, they’ve also ceased tipping. When the eatery re-opens on August 19 to six diner staggered throughout the night, guests will notice a service charge on their bill of an “untaxed flat 18 per cent service charge onto each table. This service charge will be split evenly between our BOH (Back Of House) and FOH (Front Of House),”. A day later, Bloordale’s Burdock Brewery reported they also adopted the no tipping policy with raised prices.

Though these local eateries have received the most headlines of late, they’re not the only ones. One of the city’s top spots, Bar Isabel, also doesn’t accept tips - instead, a service charge of 18 per cent is added to the bill. And when plant-based Avelo, re-opens later this month - with acrylic partition walls, HEPA air purifiers, and distanced serving by video - gratuity will be a thing of the past, with a charge of an 18 per cent service fee in its place. “We've actually never handled tipping in the conventional way, founder Roger Yang says via email. “All of our staff have always been paid fair hourly wages.” 

Chef Anthony Rose - co-owner of Big Crow BBQ Rose And Sons, Fat Pasha, Fet Zun, Madame Boeuf & Bottle, and  Schmaltz Appetizing – has implemented a 15 percent gratuity added to all takeout orders at all of his establishments. The bill reads: “Thank you. We have included a 15% gratuity which is much appreciated (if you wish to add more please do).”

This is not merely a Summer 2020 trend. Many Toronto establishments have included built-in gratuity for groups, open tabs, and bottle service as common practice for years, while others added it for regular dine-in service, such as Marché Movenpick at Brookfield Place added a 12 per cent service charge to dine-in guest checks, before shuttering earlier this year. 

Across the border

Richmond Station is borrowing the term Hospitality Included, a program and policy that famed New York restaurateur Danny Meyer instituted in 2015, eliminating tipping across his many Union Square Hospitality Group restaurants, including Gramercy Tavern and Union Square Café. 

Other NYC restaurants followed, including Meyer’s former biz, Michelin star Eleven Madison Park - by then owned by Will Guidara and Chef Daniel Humm (though their partnership recently ended, gratuity remains included in the price of the menu), David Chang’s now closed Momofuku Nishi, which debuted as gratuity-free (tips were accepted months later), and Momofuku Ko, where tasting menu prices were raised when tips were abolished.

Chef Amanda Cohen - founder of award-winning plant-based restaurant Dirt Candy in New York, and local ex-pat – wrote in July 2014 why tipping had to go, then implemented no-tipping in February 2015, making her the first in the city to abolish tips. At that time, a notice on all guest checks read, “We pay our employees a fair wage, and they share in Dirt Candy’s profits, so please NO TIPPING. A 20 per cent administrative fee is added to every bill to offset our costs. It is not a tip and none of it is distributed to employees who serve you.” Today, the restaurant is still tip-free, but has since changed to a tipping-included model.

Resetting the table

Widely cited studies by tipping expert Michael Lynn, professor at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, illustrate the number of reasons the practice of tipping is problematic, including Black workers often receive less than their white colleagues.  Women and people of colour also are tipped less. Then there’s the issue of pay disparity between co-workers, not to mention front of house staff versus back of house, And we haven’t even got to tipping and sexual harassment yet.

Here in Toronto, Arianne Persaud – founder of the #changehospitality movement and Toronto Restaurant Workers Relief Fund - a non-profit organization committed to supporting hospitality workers - has been advocating for the abolishment of tips, outlining many reasons: @cssmstr’s powerful paragraphs including why tipping is an anti-Black sentiment and how it “upholds the negative perception of restaurant work as unskilled,” the disparity between tipped and non-tipped workers, and that’s just for starters.

Working in restaurants for 15 years – one in the kitchen, the rest as a server/bartender, and in the last six in management/supervisory roles at Bar Raval, Bellwoods Brewery, and Eataly's Trattoria Milano – Persaud has seen it all. Her advice for restaurant owners considering getting rid of tipping: “Remember that the point is to centre your workers and create a source of stable work with a living wage. If owners are planning on getting rid of tipping, they have to agree to paying staff at least $20/hr. as well as providing staff stable hours and paid sick days.”

It won’t be easy

DIners will notice advantages to not tipping right away - pay the bill earlier in the meal, no having to wait around until the end, and in the times of COVID, no tip means less passing back and forth of the terminal between staff and guests. But there are many hurdles still to overcome.

Customers balk at having to pay higher prices. When Richmond Station, a finer dining eatery, raises prices, it probably won’t affect business that much, but at smaller, lower-priced restaurants, it might not be so well received. With CERB ending next month, and EI not being available to many, the cost of dining out will be heavily weighed against cooking at home.

And when a service fee or gratuity is mandatory, it is not only subject to tax (a voluntary tip is not), it turns out inclusive pricing affects a diner’s satisfaction.

The reason most restaurants who started out with not tipping, return it? Guests. They don’t like it. Roger Yang’s Awai opened in 2016 without tipping. Eventually shifting to a tasting menu format with fixed prices, “We did accept tips,” he says. “However, we still paid everyone the same wages as before, and just factored in tips as part of the overall compensation. We kept tipping the same from the customer perspective because 1) it would otherwise make the prices seem higher and 2) we wanted to keep it familiar for customers.” Note: The restaurant closed last June.

During the pandemic, Yang’s current spots, Pizzeria Du and M!LK, have accepted tips “in the conventional way.” He says, “Guests have been very generous with tips on delivery, takeout, and scoops of gelato, and we very much appreciate it. In this situation, we're making use of the wage subsidy to pay higher wages than pre-Covid, with the tips on top of that, distributed equally through a pool.”

It’s hard to get rid of tipping. Even for the pros. Meyer may have been an arbiter of no-tipping in New York, but he lost a lot of veteran staff along the way. And in the same month Richmond Station ceased tipping, Meyer, citing issues related to COVID-19, began accepting tips again at his establishments.

Persaud advises diners to “start putting pressure on their favourite restaurants by inquiring what their tip is meant to supplement, additionally, I'd ask them to expect higher prices at restaurants as eating out IS a luxury and the precedent set by optional tipping has created a false sense that it is supposed to be cheap. Diners should be caring about how the workers in their favourite restaurants are treated.”

Dr. Sylvain Charlebois, professor and senior director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, says ending tipping will not be easy, but “a conversation about the future of tipping is long overdue.”

Yang concludes, “The time is right to communicate these issues with tipping to customers and to get multiple restaurants on board. We need a wave of restaurants to eliminate tipping in order for it to become normalized.” 

Whether the wave will come, like many things right now, is TBD.

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