What other restaurant would be willing to open its books to the Times?
… none of it went to management or salaried employee payroll, the restaurant said.
That’s bullshit. The surcharge goes into general revenues. It funds everything.
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Guessing they’re afraid of sticker shock. Think Danny Meyer mentioned that in the Eater piece linked prior.
My conspiratorial mind also thinks they hope diners tip on top of the fee, increasing waitstaff compensation/remaining competitive as an employer while still allowing them to disburse that money however they see fit, including into their own pockets.
Must be nice, creating a new revenue stream out of thin air/lax regulation.
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Jon & Vinny’s charges $17.75 for a margherira, add 18% ans it’s $20.95, which is still $3.05 less than Pizzeria Bianco or Pizzeria Mozza.
As a result, servers earn the highest average hourly wages among staff, at just over $39 at one location and $42 at the other, while these tips and other bonuses bring dishwashers over $21.50 and $22, cooks up to $23 to $24, bussers and baristas to just over $25, hosts to over $29 at one location and over $34 at the other, and sommeliers to $38-$40.
That’s at least as good as certain multi-Michelin starred fine dining restaurants in the city for back-of-the-house staff. But then these restaurants’ servers make bank and far outpace what the back-of-the-house earns because it’s a gratuity system where none of that goes to back-of-the-house.
For hourly wage comparison:
- Kato Line Cook
- Roberta’s Line Cook
- Majordomo Prep Cook
- Hippo Line Cook
- Maude’s Pastry Cook
- Camphor Line Cook
- Melisse Line Cook
- Osteria Mozza Pastry Cook
- Funke Line Cook
- Angler Captain
- Cassia Server
- Gwen Back Server
- Otium Server
- Meteora Host
J&V’s servers appear make about 150% of a typical restaurant’s base salary but only benefits from tips beyond what customers pay on service charge.
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so weird did my post just disappear or did it get deleted?
got lost
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$34/hour to be a host?! Holy hell, I had no idea they can be making this kind of money, and pooled tips on top of that since they’re FOH?
What an insane world we live in, where a restaurant host makes more than 99% of teachers.
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Those numbers were including tips, a portion of which at J&V restaurants go to the BOH staff.
Most teachers get salaries. Restaurant workers commonly can’t get full-time work and have to piece together shifts at multiple places.
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The average public school teacher salary in CA is $62500. If a host/hostess making $34/hour works 5 days a week with 8 hour shifts that’s $70720 a year. I’m assuming the restaurants paying a host that much are open 6-7 days a week, and if you’re a host/hostess of that caliber restaurant, you can find another similar restaurant to work at and have consistent hours/days.
Regardless if they do or don’t, $34/hour is a pretty crazy stat to get paid being a host/hostess.
The article said “hosts to over $29 at one location and over $34 at the other.” I wonder if the hosts’ total includes the bonuses for dealing with delivery orders?
If people were consistently getting 40 hours a week at that rate, would they be complaining and suing? Maybe the hosts are happier than the servers.
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from Why the No-Tipping Restaurant Model Failed - Eater , which i only now bothered to read more closely…
“I am fully convinced that even at our very popular, busy restaurant, if we raised the prices by 20 percent starting tomorrow, we’d do significantly less business,” Hoffman said last July. Comal’s mandatory service charge allowed Hoffman and co-owner John Paluska to increase revenue while avoiding the sort of business loss attributable to sticker shock. “People are so much less likely to spend an extra dollar on a menu item than they are to throw an extra dollar at a tip,” Hoffman observed, which accords with studies that show consumers’ preferences for prices that are partitioned, rather than bundled.
Corey Lee, the chef behind the San Francisco restaurants Benu, Monsieur Benjamin, and In Situ, agrees that a service charge is a necessary bridge for diners in the U.S. “The idea of a ‘tip’ is so ingrained in American dining culture that most diners aren’t ready for service-inclusive pricing,” Lee said in July 2019. “Therefore, we break it out for them as a separate charge so they can see what’s happening.” Lee, who has imposed this charge at both the three-Michelin-starred Benu and the more casual Monsieur Benjamin, says that it avoids sticker shock while stabilizing wages for all staff and raising earnings for those individuals on the “lower end of the pay scale.”
i guess even though they say its not a gratuity, i always implicitly saw the jon and vinny service charge as a replacement for gratuity, but it seems like perhaps they are instead trying to thread the same needle danny meyer failed at, and the service charge is their way of breaking out a component of their labor cost, while still trying to eat their cake by allowing the possibility of additional gratuity. it seems like a big question lurking in the background of this is the pay disparity between front vs back of house.
the article didn’t mention it, but the lawyer representing the servers also filed two other suits on the same issue on the same day. it’s not clear to me that all servers at jon and vinny establishments are uniformly against this policy, especially since both servers and customers that don’t like it often have particularly negative reactions to it.
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an interesting reflection of which restaurants are more or less in the zeitgest…
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Would guess that’s at least partly true but for my conspiratorial mind too charitable to them and their motives. Under the guise of FOH/BOH equity they’ve created a new possible revenue stream, service charges, that as the article and @robert notes, goes directly to their bottom line. At best we can take them at their word that “staff,” as their website mentions, doesn’t include management or owners. Even if all Jon and Vinny’s employees are cool with their compensation, I don’t think that addresses the issues involved.
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Against which restaurants?
No, we can reject that claim as false. Since the “service charge” goes into general revenues, it funds everything. It’s a lie to claim that it goes to only certain things.
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moscone center and hyatt hotel in LA
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/moscone-center-lawsuit-18163667.php
it’s hard to imagine one wouldn’t be able to file a similar lawsuit at any CA restaurant with a listed service charge. from the servers’ perspective, regardless of how happy they are working at a place, they already got the moderately increased base pay rate, and then a lawyer comes along and tells them that they can also get the 18% listed service charge, and most likely, is also telling them that that was rightfully theirs to begin with…
I feel like with J&V the big issue is they wouldn’t / couldn’t tell employees where the money was going.
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SHAME SHAME SHAME
fuck Jon and Vinny, lost all respect for them
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cracking up like crazy that even Vinny didn’t tip when he went to the restaurant lmaoooooooooo
" Rules for thee and not for me"
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Where did you see this?
end of the article