Meals indoors will not return to the Union Square Café, but tips will.
Photo: Francesco Sapienza
Hospitality is no longer included. When Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group restaurants reopen for alfresco dining, they will do so with a major change in service: tips. The restaurateur announced the staff’s decision and writes on LinkedIn that “we have come to believe that the inability to share advice is the problem, not the advice itself.” Still, the New York Times He reports that he is working with One Fair Wage “to eliminate” tips. (In an opinion piece for Hour, Meyer and One Fair Wage Saru Jayaraman call for end of minimum wage with tip.) But with Union Square Cafe set to reopen Thursday, Meyer says he doesn’t want to deny employees additional wages, though a return to tips means that employees’ wages in front of the house will be more uncertain. In lieu of this so-called “Hospitality Included” program, USHG will institute an income distribution system for kitchen employees.
Meyer’s reversal comes five years after he first announced Included Hospitality, which at the time was announced as a decision that would “save the restaurant industry.” Many other influential restaurateurs, including Andrew Tarlow, David Chang, and Gabriel Stulman, did the same, and all eventually returned to a tip model. The transition of tips was not perfect at USHG, which led to staff turnover and strain. In 2018, San Francisco bar owner Thad Volger spoke to Grub Street about his own no-tip experiment and said, “There was this idea that it was inevitable, and a big storm surge … But that was nonsense. , he wasn’t realizing. ” , and it was very difficult. As much as I agree and believe in the beginning, it was too difficult. “
Talking with him TimesMeyer acknowledges that as long as there is a tipped minimum wage, which allows service employees to earn less than the regular minimum wage, “tips are the only way to make the system work.” (Still, other restaurants to have He did a job with no overturns, including Dirt Candy and the Hunns Dorky bar in Crowns Heights, which was reopened by pulling an inverse Meyer and without overturning. )
This week, One Fair Wage released a new report with findings on how the discriminatory origins of tips persist, including a $ 5 difference in hourly wages between black women and white men who worked with tips. That difference rises to almost $ 8 in New York. According to the report, restaurant workers and employers surveyed say tips have dropped 50 percent, at a time when they’re asked to risk their own health.
This post has been updated to clarify the nature of Meyer’s work with One Fair Wage.
