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It amazes me that the Labour party has been in power for 11 years without closing the notorious service charge loophole. Surely if there's any point at all in being ruled by left-leaning centrists who really like eating out, it's that they negotiate a fair deal for waiting staff? Sadly not - restaurants are still allowed to pay their staff a basic salary that is below the minimum wage and make up the rest in service charge. The tip, therefore, is neither technically nor morally a gift to the waiter: it is just more cash for the proprietor, to distribute as he decides, in the business of keeping himself just the right side of legal. I name and shame with a heavy heart, since I really like Strada, but Strada does this, as do Carluccio's, Café Rouge and Chez Gérard. If in doubt, avoid accents ... or anywhere that sounds foreign. You know.
There is a small political skirmish surrounding the practice - Tories say they will outlaw it if they are elected; Labour counters that the legislation is already in place, and that they just need to pull their fingers out. But essentially, it would solve the problem in great part if restaurants simply announced on the menu where the service charge went. If they were pocketing it, or using it to top up paltry salaries, the shame would be enough to nudge them into more equitable practices.
Having said that, there is an easier way: you, the diner, could simply ask the waiter. They might be ill-used by their employers, but they're not scared of them. However, I have seen up close what happens when you ask a waiter whether they get the service charge, because it's what my mother always does. I can exclusively reveal that it embarrasses the hell out of me. It sounds as if a) she is unfamiliar with this newfangled business of using a plastic card rather than trusty paper money, and that b) she is explicitly trying to defend the Little Guy against The Man. I don't mind that at all in the wider world, but in a restaurant I would honestly rather have a dodgy oyster.
Another big restaurant habit of hers was asking for tap water instead of bottled, and that made me want to put my head through a window - then 18 months ago it became fashionable, and now everybody's doing it. It has ascended to the level of asking where the loos are: perhaps from a very fastidious waiter you might get a glance of contempt, but generally it is filed under "acceptable diner behaviour".
All it took, in that case, was for the environmental movement to point out what we already knew, that tap water tasted the same as bottled water. Then, to point out more of what we already knew, that bottled water was a pointless waste of resources. Then, to point out how few resources we had left, how urgently we had to preserve them, and hey presto, the diner-restaurateur contract adjusted itself to untaboo the tap. Imminent environmental meltdown, in other words: it has to be literally the end of the world before we will risk embarrassment in a restaurant.
I have been to restaurants, worked in restaurants, I now review restaurants, and I still have a fear of revealing my vulgar heart by accidentally eating like a Viking or mentioning money. When I see someone on telly doing the "wrong thing" in a restaurant (most recently, it was in the The Wire, when a mini-drug baron took a cake from the trolley that was only meant for display), it affects me more than when they get shot in the head or have their children taken away.
And I know just from numbers, from the fact that the mark-up on bottled water was a massive, bankable profit for restaurants until very recently, that everyone is like this. Indeed part of the frisson of eating out is neither the food nor even the drink, but the risk, the vulnerability, the exposure. You don't get anything like this dread and fascination with behavioural rubric in a gym or a posh spa, and those are places where at least some of the time you're actually naked. Eating, we can only conclude, is more intimate than taking your clothes off. And if that's the case, waiters should be getting a whole lot more than the minimum wage, for having to watch.
mszoewilliams@yahoo.co.uk
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