The movement to eliminate tipping in American restaurants may be showing its first signs of wear. On Monday, Gabe Stulman, a New York City restaurateur who joined the growing no-gratuities campaign in December, announced that he would be reinstating the gratuity system at Fedora, his clamorous West Village haunt. Fedora was Stulman’s first venue to test out a service-included model, which required higher menu prices.
Meanwhile, last week, far from the island of Manhattan, the casual-dining chain Joe’s Crab Shack also reduced its commitment to a gratuity-free model, cutting the number of outlets participating in the tip-free experiment from 18 to 4.
Nevertheless, the service-included model is not universally popular among workers. In other evidence of growing pains, some discontent was reported in March among servers at Roman’s, a popular property in the mini-empire of the Brooklyn restaurant owner Andrew Tarlow, who followed Meyer’s lead in December by announcing that he would seek to go gratuity-free by the end of 2016. And, in San Francisco, Thad Vogler reverted back to accepting gratuity in January after experiencing high staff turnover among the formerly-tipped when he eliminated gratuity the previous year. “We couldn't compete in the market,” he told CNN. “We were faced with the options of raising prices more or bailing out.”
