I was on another thread about restaurants and I asked a question about tipping and everyone acted like I had just said Voldemort or something.
My basic rant was that I remember a time when tipping meant tipping 15% of the food portion of the bill before taxes. You were not expected to pay a tip on the beverages (the wine basically) and this was back in the day when there were sommeliers who would educate you on the wine list and make appropriate suggestions and serve you the wine properly, not just point at the most expensive wine on the list or the most popular wine on the list and then serve the wine straight from the bottle.
On top of all that, they also expect an 18% tip on the entire bill including the wine. So has the paradigm changed? The reason I ask is I had a waiter (at a nice restaurant in Las Vegas) come after me and ask about his tip (I left a $60 tip on a $700 bill with $400 worth of food and $300 worth of wine), I said you aren’t supposed to leave a tip for the wine and he looked at me like I was from Mars, so I just gave him another $40 and left, I figured he needed it more than I did but I am bothrered by the fact that I may have been undertipping for years without even knowing it.
From my experience as a waitress in college, alcohol was included in my nightly total sales report. My total sales were printed out every night and I was required to “tip out” the bartender and bus boys based on percentages of my total sales. I also claimed taxes every night based on a percentage of those total sales.
I worked at a family Mexican place (sold a lot of bottles of beers and margaritas, not 100$ bottles of wine) but my take home pay would have been substantially hurt if I weren’t tipped on the alcohol sales - and I still would have had to PAY MONEY based on alcohol sales (tipping out was non negotiable and handled by managers when I checked out every night).
Using examples - let’s say I sold 500.00 and 100.00 was alcohol. I was required to tip out 2% of my total sales (money to be divided between busboys and bartenders) - that’s 10.00. If I made $75 dollars in tips (15%), I would actually walk out of the restaurant with 65. If my tables did not tip on the 100 of alcohol sales, I would have made $60.00 (15% of 400.00) and walked out with only $50.00, because whether or not the people tipped me, I would still have to tip out 2% of my total sales.
This is also the reason that service would have to be stunningly bad for me to leave a poor tip. If I stiff a server, I am actually costing them money, since they will still have to tip out on my total ticket cost. That rarely comes up though, putting myself through college waiting tables left me very sympathetic to waitstaff!
Maybe it’s different with fine dining and when expensive bottles of wine are involved, but in my experience, it would have been financially painful for customers not to tip on alcohol sales.
I’ve never heard that wine should be taken out of the subtotal before calculating the tip. What would be the reason behind this? The only case where I could see this to be fair is when the waiter plays no role in the taking of the drink order or delivering it to you - such as when you’re sitting at the bar before your table is ready. Those drinks will probably show up on your bill but the waiter had nothing to do with them.
My standard procedure is 15% of the total bill (including drinks and tax) for standard service when its just the SO and me. More or less if the service is especially good or bad.
When its a larger group (like every two weeks when we meet friends for dinner) we tend to tip more like 20-25% for even average service, more if it was really good. We tend to be a fairly rowdy bunch, hang around for a long time and talk etc so we always tip extra.
Well, if you’re talking about beer or wine by the glass, I agree with you. Its not like I don’t tip bartenders or cocktail waitresses. I was talking about fine dining.
Where in the world would you get an idea like that? I’m almost 50; I don’t know what good ol’ times you are remembering.
First, you do tip on the beverages. You might not need to tip 15% on an $80 bottle of wine if you just order if off the wine list (same work as the $15 one) but you do tip on cocktails, wine, etc. Alcohol is a high-margin item for a restaurant but your waiter probably has to share the tip with the bartender. If there is a sommelier and he helps you select a wine tailored for your meal, the tip for the wine goes to him. There are still sommeliers. There is a really good one at Maestro in the Tysons Ritz (I live in Tysons, where in DC do you live?)
Your tip in the Vegas restaurant was definitely a cheapskate tip. Even if you just had $400 in food alone, an $80 tip would have been in order in a “nice restaurant” unless you were unhappy with the service. For you bill I would have left at least double your $60 tip.
To answer the more general question, 15% is a minimum for acceptable service, up to 20% for a higher standard of service. Tip more than 20% if you got really special service; they’ll remember you next time. I have never tipped more than 25% anywhere that I can remember.
I’ve always included alcohol in the total and really haven’t heard of anyone else doing differently as of late. From me, they’re going to get 15% unless they blow it. At a nice place it’s 20%, usually deservedly earned, and if it’s exceptional they’ll get a bit more on top.
Just to echo what Glory said, the standard good tip these days is 18-20% (whihc includes alcohol and tip). Most waiters are required to tip out about 5% of their sales to bussers, runners, and bartenders. Also, you generally end up giving more than 5% because it is a bad idea to be less than generous to your co-workers. So even if you get 18% tips all night, you will only walk with ~13% of your sales, from which you will have to pay taxes. Stiffing someone, or not tipping on alcohol/to-go orders might end up costing your waiter money.
I was taught the same thing so don’t feel like you’re hanging out there alone. When you tip, you subtract the wine or champagne and the tax. I have since learned (from my waiter ex husband) that it is customary to tip 10% on wine, and 15%-20% on bar drinks.
As for the waiter chasing you down? Wow, how tacky is that? I thought tipping was optional. I would have told him to go pound salt.
As far as I am aware, that’s a paradigm that never was. At least, not in recent memory in North America.
And as for your tip in Vegas-- that’s a super cheap tip on a $700 bill. For a bill that large, I’d assume that a) the server and appropriate tipped-out restaurant staff would have worked their buns off for you, and b) by the time that server tips out the kitchen, hostess and bartender, they’ll be left with diddly-squat on a cheapo tip like that.
If I rang up that large a bill, I would be tipping $140. Minimum. Then again, I worked in the industry for years, and I don’t think 20% on excellent service on a bill that high is exorbitant. As far as I’m concerned, if the bill starts reaching the triple-digits, I’m going to give the server some extra cash for the time and effort involved in serving a bill that size.
I’m not saying they were good old times but tipping protocol changes over time. There was a time when 10% was the standard tip but you were also expected to tip the host/hostess. I guess I need to catch up to the times, and I am only old enough to have learned my tipping habits 20 years or so ago.
I live in DC but I have lived most of my life in NYC where you tipped twice the tax (8.25%). Then when I started going to nice restaurants I asked the sommelier what the protocol was and he told me twice tax on the food and drink, nothing for the wine. I guess the standard has become 20% for food and drink and 10% for the wine.
I’m pretty sure that I understand the OP’s No-Tip-On-Wine rule to be a relic of when sommeliers roamed wild in the dining world, and as such, your tip for the waiter was for what the waiter did, which did not include recommending and serving wine, so you could ignore wine in the bill.
That has changed so many ways from the past to now (fewer sommeliers, waiters having mandatory tipouts to various other staffmembers like busboys and barstaff that they didn’t used to have to tipout, trend to tip on tax, 15% is the new minimum, waiters (at least in less classy places) making a base hourly that’s below minimum wage and relying on tips to bring them above it, to name but a few), that the short answer is: tip 15-20% of the total bill, alcohol and tax included.
I’ve heard of the no-tip-on-drinks rule, but I’ve never followed it. I tip 20% on the whole bill unless I receive bad service. It’s discretionary, as far as I’m concerned. Though I believe it’s bad form to not tip as a rule or to tip less than 15%.
Well, that certainly make my life simpler. I’m not trying to cheat anyone or be cheap (despite the snide comments from some posters), that’s just the way I learned it. I realize that other people were tipping more but I just figured they were just ignorant and overtipped to hide their ignorance. I guess it was just me.
I wonder what makes the tipping rate go up over time. It seems to me that the tipping rate should be static so long as the menu prices kept up with inflation. I have the same experience with spa treatments, the tipping rate has increased since I had my first massage. Things like tipping out might have led to this rise. I know that there are a lot of strip bars where the stripper has to pay for the privelege of stripping there on any particular night and hope to make it up on tips. Most cabbies in NYC have to cover a nut as well. Are we getting to the point where waiters and waittresses are also becoming independent contractors?