Whoever said it’s better to give than to receive wasn’t talking about tipping. Waiters around the UK should be starting to receive a £200m-a-year bonanza thanks to a new law that means every penny paid in tips, including service charges, on a restaurant bill will have to go to staff.
Yet exactly how much of the money will end up in servers’ pockets is unclear. The law was changed because some restaurants took service charges as part of their profits or to pay for overheads such as lighting.
The new law allows workers to take their employers to a tribunal, but on Friday night in London’s West End, most diners and restaurant staff were unaware of the change.
In fact, there was not even much agreement about what constitutes a tip. “I mainly just pay the service charge,” said Natasha Chivers, who works in theatre production and stops to talk in Soho on her way to work. “If you pay a service charge, you assume that the money is going to the people who’ve served you.”
“In America, you go to the bar and buy a drink and it’s a dollar or two dollars each time,” said her colleague Tom Gibbons. Service charges are tips, they agree.
Kilian Tamagno, a waiter at Henri, a new French bistro in Covent Garden, disagrees. “The service charge, for me, is not a tip because you have to pay it,” he said. “Oh, you can ask to remove it if you weren’t happy with the service, but that happens once every six months maybe.
“The tip is really something where you thank me for my service, and there’s a smile with it, a compliment. So, for me, it’s not the same thing.”
It may seem simple, but tipping is a complex social phenomenon that academics have pondered for decades, puzzled as to why tips are treated differently in different cultures, and why people tip at the end of a meal when they get no obvious advantage from doing so.
On the whole, people say they dislike the practice, but there are no signs of it dying out. It may even be increasing because younger Gen Z customers are more likely to leave a gratuity, according to Tipjar, a cashless tipping system.
In the UK, the awkwardness of trying to work out how much to leave has gradually been replaced with a near-ubiquitous service charge of 12.5% to 15% that is added to a bill and usually paid without demur.
Brandon Whiting, who works at Prosecco Caffè, an Italian cafe-bar in Soho, also shares tips added to the bill by payment card and thinks the new legislation will not affect that. This is known as a tronc – from the French tronc des pauvres, or poor box – where tips are pooled and shared out by a troncmaster.
Whiting is happy with his tips at Prosecco Caffè, but his previous employers have not been so enlightened. At one restaurant, the operations manager and the owner “used to take all the service charge”, he said. “But they’re not in the building. We’re on the floor, we’re running, we’re cleaning, we’re there until midnight.”
Cash tips are different, he said. Some places put it in a jar and split the cash. At others, servers keep it themselves.
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“I think it’s your prerogative,” he said. “People might think you’re a little bitch for keeping it but it’s your business. A lot of the time, people do tip you and say ‘this is for you – thank you for looking after us’. Cash is a free-for-all.”
Next door at Bistro 1, owner Tuncay Kurnaz offers diners a two-course mediterranean meal for £19.90 and feels that the service charge helps him keep prices low.
“Cash tips are always given to the staff,” he said. “Service charge is for complimentary bread, olives, plus all the breakages – your glasses, cutlery. Lighting, heating, cooling.”
That has all changed with the new legislation, but Kurnaz is confused over what the rules mean for his restaurant. “There’s no clear guideline,” he said. “You have to give it to the staff. But how are you going to distinguish the VAT?”
How will he account for employers’ and employees’ national insurance contributions, and income tax, he asks.
Other restaurant chains have been trying to shore up this income stream in other ways. Last year. Ping Pong, a dim sum chain, scrapped service charges and introduced what it called an optional “brand charge” instead.
Miller & Carter, a steakhouse chain, is in dispute with workers over its policy of making servers pay 2% to 3% of sales into the tronc, about £60 to £90 per shift, according to Unite.
Waiting staff say this is unfair since not all of those sales result in tips, so they can end up making a loss, and the policy is designed to use servers’ tips to shore up wages for chefs. Mitchells & Butlers, which owns the chain, said its teams could agree “through a democratic and transparent process” how tips were distributed.