Two JP restaurants to add 3% fee to help pay back-end workers

We are very careful about setting our menu prices and we believe we do so fairly, acknowledging the fact that we buy only high quality ingredients (and yes, buying from small local farms costs more). We explained this in detail in our open letter to the community (see our websites or the back of our menus), but for the purpose of paying kitchen staff more, raising menu prices is not effective. The hospitality admin fee goes directly to the kitchen, so %-wise effect on our guests is small but effect on kitchen pay is immediate and large.

If the prices had simply increased 3%, you would end up tipping the waiter (slightly) more, reflecting the overall increase in your bill.

The waitstaff still is being paid less than the kitchen staff. I don't know what the policy is at Tres Gatos, but by law, they do not have to pay the service staff more than $3.00/hour.

While I applaud paying the back of the house more, and doing it in a way that rewards the kitchen workers during the back-breakingly busy shifts, I don't see how it justifies shorting the waitstaff.

Menu prices should reflect the quality of the ingredients and the amount of labor going into each dish. From the start, the Tres Gatos and Centre Street Cafe teams made the commitment to buy only high quality ingredients, to source from local farms and small vendors whenever possible, and to make most of what we serve in house, from scratch. We could choose to use lesser ingredients and to make fewer dishes from scratch in order to lower menu prices (as many other restaurants do), but we don't want to do that. We are very proud of our chefs and cooks and the food that they prepare every day.

Regarding tipping, we know that some guests will not change their habits (will continue to tip 20% or so on the total) with the new fee, and we also know that some will deduct the 3% hospitality fee from the total, and that's okay. Fortunately, we're lucky to work with amazing servers and bartenders who are behind this effort and who recognize that some guests may lower their tip slightly in response to the fee. We don't want to do away with tipping because we don't want to take that prerogative away from guests.

Exactly. This was a calculation targeted to give specific across the board raises, so how do we implement 3% and not have the prices look screwy? Also, the whole point of raising prices in this manner is that when other costs go up in the future and we need to cover them, both tipped and non-tipped employees will see their wages move up in tandem. There is a core issue here that I know is not familiar to people, and it is extremely difficult to find a solution that works and is fair to 2 entirely different types of employees, with completely different sets of legal rules.. It's not a simple problem, and this policy is the reult of almost 4 years of searching for a the most streamlined approach that addresses the core issue and has the greatest chance of success.. We have handed out raises and allowed that to come from the bottom line right up until the business becomes unsustainable and threatens to destroy the 45 jobs that we are responsible for, not to mention our own livelihoods and the obligations to banks and investores and our mission in the community.. If it were an easy solution no one would be talking about it or hearing about it and we wouldn't be exposing the business to this enormous risk.. yet in the restaurant industry it is front and center and a major source of dialogue.. It is a complicated issue that we are glad to talk about in detail, but if the response to our sincere attempts is "we don't believe you and we think you are lying" then there isn't a whole lot of room for us to try and share the vision.. Our teams are 100% behind us and we can only hope that our guests and community will choose to support us as well. It's scary.

Thanks anon for the comment, and clarification. It's absolutely not the same restaurant. My partner and I loved the previous Cafe, and were friends with the owner, but our intention was not to redo the look and reopen with a similar restaurant. We share many of Felicia's values (such as sourcing as much as possible from Stillman's and other local farms), and we loved the idea of continuing her diner-style weekend brunch, but our goal was to introduce an entirely new dinner menu (Italian), and we were lucky enough to attract one of Boston's top chefs, Brian Rae, to execute it.

Referring back to some of my earlier posts on this thread about menu prices: we price our dishes at the Cafe as competitively as possible, but it's important to point out that Brian's crew makes everything, including the pasta, from scratch. We make our doughnuts from scratch, we make our dinner bread from scratch. We use the highest quality ingredients. So anon is right, the difference in overhead, the cost of goods, etc varies a lot from restaurant to restaurant, and a whole host of factors need to be taken into account when evaluating whether a place's prices are reasonable or not.

And finally, profit margin: for restaurants in general, it is razor thin. For restaurants that choose to buy high quality ingredients and make everything from scratch, it is especially challenging. Our margins are in the mid single digits, meaning we have very little cushion during slow times, such as winter.

But I wouldn't put it past Tres Gatos. I like the restaurant, but it's at least a touch "foodie".

To the topic at hand, wouldn't the line item for the fee be easily to separate out into raising wages for the cooks/kitchen staff? If you're just raising prices on the food/beverage, you're just factoring in more for tip, as your 20% will be affected by the higher product prices.

TG absolutely fits in with a lot of the places I assume you classify as "South Endery." Toro most notably. I love the place but let's not act as though TG would have survived in JP 15 years ago, before it started it's transition to South End by the Arbs.

So make the FOH divide the tips with BOH and say so on the menu. Raise prices too if you need to bump up the amount collected by tips. (And also pay BOH better.)

Any way you look at it this fee sounds scummy.

Please do not mention any of the restaurants that you worked at! Tip pools can legally only include tipped employees such as servers, bartenders, bussers, runners.. Chefs, cooks, managers, dishwashers cannot be part of the pool.. Servers can of course voluntary hand over money if they decide to, but it absolutely cannot be part of a tip pool or controlled or dictated by the restaurant in any way.

that face this kind of conundrum?

Restaurants are unique. Name another type of business where half the employees are paid by the hour and the other half are paid by tips.

I'm not saying it is a good system. You can get better service in some other countries where people don't tip. We should do away with this dumb tipping system and just pay all employees a decent wage.

RhoninFire: thanks for your comment. I have to point out that our profit margin at both restaurants is in the middle single digits, so if our main intent all along has been to maximize profit, we've done a pretty dismal job at it. Restaurant failure rate is so high because restaurants operate on VERY thing profit margins. We're proud that almost five years in, Tres Gatos is still around, and we plan to be around for another twenty years. But we won't be able to unless we make adjustments, and what we don't want to do is stop buying from small farms, stop donating to local charities and supporting local nonprofits, and stop making our dishes from scratch.

Again, our long-term goal is not to maximize profits, it's to make sure we have a sustainable business model that allows us to treat our employees well (with job security) and to run our restaurants with integrity.

When things go well, a server is serving "good product at a rapid pace." I worked with and in many great kitchens, but I also dealt with my share of slow, mediocre or worse cooks. If the food sucks, the chef makes the same amount, but the server is often punished with a lower tip.

When I had a table waiting 25 minutes for a cold app that was delayed in the kitchen, I either had to charm the hell out of the patron or accept that they would likely shaft my tip. On a busy night, time to charm is rare. If someone's steak was overdone, or half the entrees sat under a heat lamp congealing while the rest of the plates were still being made, or even if the food was, through no fault of the chef, simply not to someone's taste, then it could effect my tip.

The chef makes the same as he always would.

I mostly worked in mid-range, neighborhood places, though I worked high end and dives as well. I liked my work, was a very good waitress, and a consistent high seller where I worked. In a typical week, I wouldn't have a night in which I made as much as the cook or chef did for the week. It happened rarely, but that wasn't the norm. And in the better restaurants where I worked, the waitstaff made quite a bit less than the cooks/chefs-- maybe as much as the garde manger or sous chefs, but without health insurance or any other benefits.

I don't know why, but I seem to be one of the few people here who thinks the 3% kitchen charge is a good idea. I think the kitchen staff deserves it, and they should receive more money. But as I've written elsewhere under this story, having spent about 5 years working in kitchens, and about 16 years tending bar & waiting tables, in my experience waiting tables is the toughest of three tough jobs.