The American Restaurant Culture

The involuntary vacating of writing duties that you have witnessed from Barn-megaparsec is due to the chief writer, me, being occupied with immense amounts of work. I have worked in a couple of restaurants for over 3 years, in roles as server, host, expo, dish, and prep or line cook. 

3 years is not a long time compared to some lifers, but given that most people who work in restaurants only remember it from part-time jobs in youth, it's probably enough time to discern some differences between the different management styles and reflect on how restaurant work can be so villified that any number of part-time job holders can walk out or fail to show up every day, while at the same time can hold to its credit lifetime employees who in their old age still show up for work after 20 years in a place that teenagers denigrate after 20 minutes of employment.

The time has come to do some writing about restaurant work, and the focus will NOT be on service. Everyone and their brother has read something on Yahoo or in Reader's Digest that details "things your server will never tell you." You can call this blog post "things you'll never hear from your cook, because he's not allowed to talk to you."

I want to start off with some definitions of terms that are used in American restaurant work. Some are elementary and assume you have never worked in this field before.

• BOH: back-of-house, meaning invisible or mostly obscured from customer vision. Refers to cooks, drive-thru, dishwashers, prep personnel, kitchen managers, and any BOH support.
• FOH: front-of-house, meaning within customer vision. Refers to servers, hosts, bussers, food runners, service managers, and any other FOH support. Expos may be FOH or BOH, but typically they are considered FOH.
• Expo: A person whose job it is to manage the flow of food and to order food runners and servers to take food tableside when complete tickets are filled. This job involves yelling and coordinating different stations within the restaurant. An expo is the last person responsible for making sure that food goes out with appropriate quality.
• Tipping out: A percentage of the tips made by all the servers are provided to those employees whom the management has seen fit to provide part of their wage through tips. This is done at my current place of employment, but I do not know what percentage is used. It's also calculated to make servers realize that they are just a cog in a machine, and they couldn't provide excellent service without their support staff.
• Host: You probably already know, but hosts and hostesses are the ones who seat you and keep track of who is in each server's section. They are typically young, pretty, and lack the experience or equanimity to be a server at the present time. They receive a flat wage and may be tipped out. It is common to have at least one host even in a small restaurant.
• Food runners: They are required to be as presentable as servers, and they sometimes act as surrogate servers, but they too lack the experience or equanimity to be a server at the present time. They receive a flat wage and may be tipped out. Food runners may not be present in small restaurants. We did not have them at Steak n Shake.
• Bussers: The bottom of the FOH totem pole at any restaurant. Customers rarely expect bussers to provide any service. They may not be as presentable or courteous as servers. They receive a flat wage and may be tipped out. Bussers may not be present in small restaurants. We did not have them at Steak n Shake.
• Line: In the BOH, a line is generally where food goes from being initially ordered to being fully made and sold, particularly all hot dishes. Following the experience of the automobile assembly line, the restaurants adopted the production line as the most effective way to make dishes and store the prepped portions.
• POS: Product Ordering System. This is the computer terminal in which the server enters all orders. It simultaneously prints orders in the kitchen, tracks sales for management pursposes, and creates receipts for the customer. It usually allows for completely customized kitchen messages in the case of a strange request. However, cooks are expected to be aware of nearly all modifications to the menu items using the lingo on the ticket, without having to ask for server clarification. Many restaurants have a standardized POS, whereas some larger corporations can afford a proprietary design that better meets their needs.
• Board: Tickets are placed on the board. In older style restaurants, tickets are handwritten and they are put on clips and slid on a big string that runs the length of the line. In restaurants with standard POS terminals, the tickets come out of a printer, and the board is a metal surface with small marbles underneath, that provide friction and hold a ticket in place when it is pushed into the gap. In restaurants where the cooks will often have oily hands, as in a grill cook at a fast food restaurants, tickets are sometimes eschewed in favor of a computer terminal that displays orders instead. If communication between cooks on the line is necessary, sometimes "board clear" is shouted to indicate that the last ticket has been sold. 
• Dish: Once you step into a restaurant, a dishwasher is a person, and the thing that washes dishes is called a "dish machine." Every restaurant with sit-down service has at least one dishwasher and one dish machine. They are typically the last to leave because they have to clean all the pans for all the stations, without which those stations cannot fully close. Dish, therefore, is only as fast as the slowest station in the restaurant. Because dish does not really require the best people, it is sometimes considered the lowest spot on BOH pecking order, but a good dishwasher is extremely valued and can make as much as the cooks on the line.
• Pans: These do not refer to skillets or similar. A pan is a metal or plastic tub for carrying prepped food quantities and storing them on the line. A full pan (or hotel pan) is large and rectangular. Smaller pans are defined in terms of them: there exist third-pans (1/3 the size, long and rectangular) and six-pans (1/6 of the size, square) and nine-pans (1/9 of the size, small and rectangular). Any of these pans can be shallow or deep. This pan terminology is not universally known at all restaurants; at my current job, many of the cooks are inexperienced and have no idea what I'm talking about.
• Soup well: The soups or other hot liquids (like queso) are usually prepped ahead of time and then kept warm in a soup well. This device rests on a countertop, and on the bottom has a layer of water that it converts into steam. Pans of soup are kept on a rack above the steam, which keeps them hot. Since the heating is uneven, it is necessary to stir the soups frequently. It is also necessary to keep water in the well at all times. If not, the well will not function properly, and it may emit a nasty burnt smell.
• Pantry: Often considered as separate from the main line, pantry is the part of the kitchen at which salads, soups, appetizers, and desserts are made. Protein is not cooked at this station.
• Spider: At one of the restaurants at which I worked, a spider was a small handheld filter through which oil was passed when transferring from the wok back into the oil bucket. It had a very fine mesh that removed impurities. This nomenclature may not be universal, but for this particular device it is the only name I know.
• Ramekin: This is a corruption of the French term ramequin. It refers to a small vessel that holds from 2-8 oz of a sauce or side item. Though some restaurants use ceramic ramekins and wash them, the overwhelming trend in restaurant business is to purchase a very large amount of disposable black plastic ramekins of small (2 oz) or large (4 oz) size. The plastic ramekins have another advantage in that they have a lip to which a lid can be attached, meaning they can be combined with to-go orders. Ramekins are often referred to as "rams". To avoid ambiguity, the older small ceramic bowls, such as might hold baked beans, are given another name. Ramekin today almost universally refers to a disposable item.
• Deck brush: This is not a "floor scrubber" or any silly nomenclature like that. The correct term for this is a deck brush, following the usage of such a floor-scrubbing tool on the decks of ships. A typical floor cleaning policy at the end of the night is to drop soapy water, scrub the floor with the deck brush, and then squeegee the water into drains. Mops are rarely used in BOH, but in the FOH mops and hot, soapy water are often used because they do not require drains or squeegees.
• Spindle: A spindle is an upright sharp stick on a mount; it is what tickets are stabbed onto when they are sold. It might be purpose-sold for stabbing tickets, or it might be a section of 2x4 with a nail sticking through it. Whatever works.
• Bus tub: Distinct from pans, bus tubs are of standardized size and are always made of plastic. They are both used for storing dishes as a busser makes his rounds, or they can be used for storing prepped food in large quantities, like salad mix. If a dishwasher is being bombarded from many servers or bussers dumping their bus tubs in his station at the same time, it might be jokingly remarked that he just got hit by a bus.
• Wrecking shop: The solution to a hectic situation on the line is to just kick ass. Wrecking shop is the restaurant equivalent of working very fast to meet the customer's demands, and doing one's work entirely correctly despite the stress of the situation. If your line is messy because everyone has been furiously making and selling food for the past hour, then a manager who complains about the mess might receive "We've been wrecking shop" as an excuse. This might be a more recent development, but I've heard it in a lot of places.
• Shut down: When the manager needs to announce that all customers have made their way through ordering food, and no more may be expected to be sold, the call for "shut down" is given. This means that cooks can start taking steps that can't be undone, like throwing away soups or rice that couldn't be sold tomorrow. Shut down is always later than closing time, because the managers must ensure that the restaurant will feed new customers until at least the posted closing time. Shut down might not come until an hour after closing time, on a very busy day.
• GM: General Manager
• DM: District Manager
• KM: Kitchen Manager
• Dead: The restaurant is dead if it's really slow or empty. However, that doesn't mean that you'll get really fast service. Maybe the managers wanted to pinch some pennies and cut 2/3 of their service staff just a few minutes earlier. Maybe there's only one cook back there. Even a mild rush can overwhelm the skeleton crew in the period 2-4 pm. Because large business is unlikely in this time period, this is when managers ask prospective employees to drop off applications and when they schedule interviews.
• Walk-in: The word "fridge" is never used in a restaurant. If it's a walk-in refrigerator, it's called a "walk-in". The smaller refrigerators that are kept nearby stations underneath the counter are called "coolers".
• Running trash: Sometimes it is as innocuous as it sounds, as in just taking trash to the dumpster. However, it's often used as a coded message for "taking a smoke break".
• All day: This means "everything that is currently on the board." To say that you need "four ribeyes all day" is to say that that is how many steaks you need for all the tickets you presently have.

Here's something you'll never hear from a cook: We are sick and tired of hearing all the waiter rants online and in publication. Having worked both as a waiter and as a cook, I can tell you that being a waiter is better than being a cook. Why? 4 basic reasons.

1. Temperature. The dining room has to be relatively comfortable because customers eat there. However, the kitchen might be sweltering, the floor might be greasy, every surface might be dirty, and the air circulation might suck. Because waiters stay out of the kitchen generally, they don't even realize how comfortable their work environment comparatively is.
2. Pay. Yes, I know that there are whiny servers out there who gripe about that $1 tip that they made from a big table, but these cases are few and far between. Cooks without any managerial responsibilities generally make under $10 per hour. Servers make significantly more than that once they learn the ropes at their place. I often dine with servers in the employee area on my break, and I hear how they consider a mediocre morning or afternoon shift's tips to amount to 50% more than I earned cooking for them that morning. Don't try to deny it and say that people tip less than you think. I  served at a Steak n Shake and I got stiffed a lot. Our most popular meals were $4. Even on that level of tipping, I earned noticeably more than I have ever earned as a cook, and my shifts were usually shorter and easier. Servers who whine about bad tips should have their fingernails ripped out. It's just disgraceful and I'll never tire of hating on it.
3. Management. Servers are often disciplined within near-earshot of customers, so the manager isn't going to cuss at you or make obnoxious threats. In the BOH, managers do freely scream at cooks to hurry up and move their asses. They will piss on you if you let something go wrong, even if there isn't jack shit you could have done about it. Oftentimes cooks are treated as being able to deal with more bullshit, as though it's a natural order. When business picks up, and you do more work than usual, you'll rarely if ever be congratulated. Receiving a simple thank-you is often all it takes to make a cook feel better about his job, but I can't even remember the last time I heard it from anyone in a management position at my present job.
4. Tedium. During times in which you aren't completely busy, and you're cleaning or stocking, your responsibility is usually limited to one small area. It's rather boring.

Despite this, there are plus points to being a cook rather than a server, but some of them are unique to me.

1. I don't like lying or pretending to be happy. I was actually a really good server at my first job, but I was much younger then, and I don't know if I could conscientiously come up with rapid-fire excuses or blame the kitchen for my mistakes when I know what I know now.
2. Cooking food makes you feel like you're producing something for mankind. Good service is relative, and not everybody even wants full service in the first place, but when you make hot, delicious food, it's just innately valuable. 
3. Some of the servers actually do understand you, and when you help another human being recover from a mistake, their happiness rubs off on you, and the fact that you can help them earn a better tip makes you feel good.
4. The labor is sometimes physically demanding. It requires more use of your muscles than being a server. You'll be standing all day long, rushing when needed, and moving big boxes, trays, and pans of stuff around all the time. Sometimes you realize that there are people who pay to receive a gym membership just to do what you get to do anyway, which makes you feel good.
5. If you work in a place that has good food (and almost every restaurant DOES have good food, it just needs to be prepared properly) then your employee benefits are a plus. Most places will give a free meal in between shifts of a double, and on single shifts before or after, 50% discount on whatever you order. It's also common to give employees a 20% discount when they come in to eat not as employees, but as guests with their families or friends. I should point out that most restaurants extend the same advantages to servers. However, the policy depends on the attitude of management. Cooks have pretty high retention in places where the boss lets them take home a free meal every once in a while without ringing it in, and they have pretty low retention if the boss gives them shit for what sort of employee meal they order.

My current job leaves me in a dilemma: the hours are as free-flowing as I could want, but the environment is as crappy as it gets. For the moment, my resolve is to milk it while I can, since this restaurant is basically seasonal and well over half of the staff, probably including me, will not find employment there after the summer months. I work major overtime every week. My boss has never said "Go home, you're on overtime" and they have sometimes actually asked me to stay to do some final chore after my station is broken down.

The restaurant industry is something for which I will always have respect. It is the most unbridled form of capitalism. A person or some people have an idea for a good place to eat, and they can start very small, perhaps operating from their own home. The sky is the limit beyond that. Americans as a whole are always willing to try something new, but they are notoriously finicky for what will get their food dollars reliably, so the fortunes of a restaurant or chain of them sways in the wind. The only fast-food giant that has always remained embedded at the top is McDonald's; at various times all the others (Jack in the Box, Wendy's, Burger King, KFC, Taco Bell, and many others) have struggled to maintain their current position. On the other hand, the tools and equipment of a restaurant or chain are not diverse or expensive compared to almost any other field, so a new startup can take advantage of the churn and get used equipment from any vendor with waning fortunes, and use the tools of the old failures to make a new success. Because the capital cost of a restaurant is so small, and the labor cost can be elastically tailored to suit the level of demand expected, restaurants can break even very quickly after opening, and so even if a chain opens a new location, and starts losing business after the initial fanfare dies down, they might have made a profit even if the doors close in a year.

To give you an example? I remember in Seguin, TX there was a California-based company that opened a restaurant called "Malibu Burger Shack" with expensive, gourmet burgers. I ate there once and was horrified at the price, but I think everyone in Seguin ate there at least once. They did get a bit of hubbub and the place was packed in the opening weeks. Even though they didn't even last 6 months, I'm quite confident that the CEO who came up with the idea wasn't hurting too bad.

As for the employees? Don't weep for them. So what if you worked for a company that closed down your location? If you have experience and a good attitude, you'll get a job in a hundred places within a 10-mile radius. It's impossible in America to remain unemployed if you are willing to work in a restaurant; consequently, when anyone says that they are unable to get any job, I interpret that to mean that they think that my line of work is beneath them, and so I lose sympathy instantly. Granted, my full-time work at a restaurant earns me perhaps under 20k annually, but that's enough for a person to live on while they continue to look for more gainful employment.

I have a sympathy for the managers because I know how much hatred they get for themselves from the employees. Sometimes it's justified, sometimes not. But my dad has been a restaurant GM for over 20 years, and whenever he explains how he does things, the logic of management makes sense to me. Of course good managers aren't universal, and if a corporation or private company is poorly-run at the very top, then bad managers will infest it in no time.

Although I have never technically worked with a pure fast-food company, my former jobs were with two corporations. The first one, I don't mind saying, was at Steak n Shake. The other, which was my longest-held job, was with a small but growing pan-Asian restaurant chain. I became a trainer at one position with this company. They would have given me more expanded employment options had I been able to travel to other stores, but I was a full-time student and this was not possible.

Let me start with Steak n Shake. If this location is not near you (weird, and I pity you) it's a 24-hour restaurant that focuses on "steakburgers" and milkshakes. They also have a breakfast menu, although it seems like few people know this. It's cheaper, albeit more basic, than IHOP. This company was founded in 1934, and its business model of casual dine-in or carry-out (with drive-thru coming later) is older than that of McDonald's or any modern fast food locations. The fact that these locations are often open 24 hours means that if you can stomach it, you can work nightmarishly long hours and the bosses will willingly dole out overtime if you're good and you cover shifts for people who never showed up. My location had an excellent GM, and most of the other managers were also tactful and courteous. My coworkers were mostly good. When I left after eight months to go to Texas (giving ample notice), I was missed, and even showing up 2 years later, there were workers there who remembered me. The thing that inevitably struck me about Steak n Shake is that they had a large component of their workforce composed of "lifers", who had held employment in the same chain or perhaps the same location for 10 or 15 or more years. You have to attribute that to a good company. The more I looked into it, from the top the bottom, Steak n Shake had effective corporate policies, good management and trainers, good advertising presence in the regions in which it operated, and the product was both cheap and pretty satisfying. Both as a customer and an employee, I really think Steak n Shake is a good company.

Then I worked for a place called Mama Fu's. This was also a corporation, albeit much smaller. Perhaps there were 7-10 locations at the time I was hired. I was with the opening crew of the New Braunfels location. I originally trained as a server again, but was moved to expo more often, and then did that full-time, until I decided I would receive more reliable hours if I became a cook instead. This change was heartily welcomed by my managers. I found BOH work to be much harder than FOH work. The pace was tougher and without the incentive of tips, you rarely felt rewarded for doing a better job. However, my perception was wrong on this count. Although there was no monetary incentive for wrecking shop, it gave you the kind of respect from your coworkers that you never got as a server. Cooks who can stay cool under pressure and with all the boards full of tickets get their recognition from those that witness them doing their job well. Management here was mixed. I felt we always had poor GMs, but our KM was always a good guy. However, this particular location had some co-workers whom I found utterly intolerable. At one point I arrived at a chaotic situation at this job, finding myself being ordered around by someone who was junior to me, and I waited one infuriating hour to receive an explanation or for a manager to return. When no one did, I hung up my apron and quit on the spot. I regretted this decision later, but I'm a man of my word.

The current job that I hold is with a family-owned company. It is technically one location, although the location is directly adjacent to several similar restaurants and bars which are owned by the same family. The neighborhood could be said to be owned by them, and they may have achieved an effective level of synchronization between these locations. However, compared to a corporation, the level of organization is incredibly sloppy, the management is simultaneously lax and irritable, there are no full-time trainers, and little or no incentive given to those who choose to teach others to do things the right way. Maybe it's just a madhouse in summer (business on weekend days exceeds $50,000 in sales and sometimes approaches $100,000) and in winter, when sales are significantly smaller, there may exist some kind of rationalization.

Sorry to keep banging on about it, but I really like corporations! They create a very common sense barrier of entry: giving a shit. If you don't give a shit, it doesn't matter if you show up on time, you're an obstacle to success. How can you please all the customers if the cooks haven't been trained or don't care to do it the correct way? Whenever a restaurant rolls out a new recipe, they do testing to see what is the best portion size, flavor modifications, and cost control tweaks. A corporation does these things better, and then they employ a network of trainers to ferry the information both to new hires and existing workers. In a family-owned or independent restaurant, there are often 10,000 ways to do everything, and different people will be dead-set in their ways until the day they get yelled at for doing a sub-par job. And then they'll blame somebody else and keep doing it, or adjust their method so it just barely scrapes by. Corporations hire trainers who do everything by the book. If there's a question, the answer exists in writing within easy reach. At a small business, the answer might not exist except in the mind of somebody who came up with the recipe, who happened to quit 2 years ago. 

This isn't to say that there aren't employees who work long-term in a family restaurant. Of course there are many people like that. But new hires don't receive the same level of training and conditioning as a corporation would give them, and consequently everybody shows up with their own differing opinions of how to do things. A worker must resign himself to simply not knowing the exact right way of doing things. For me, I'll never get used to it, and I look forward to the end of summer so I can move on to something else.

I want to add a list of "cook secrets" and something of a rebuttal to all these "waiter secrets" you keep seeing:

• Just because something is a special, doesn't mean it's virtually expired. Sometimes they have equally fresh proteins in every department and they just want to sell a lot of a particular item because the market price is cheap this week. Furthermore, if you think a special involving fish could involve fish that is past freshness, then smell it. Bad fish always stinks, and you can't sell stinky fish. If they are trying to sell the fish before it goes bad, is that really dishonorable in any way?
• If a server actually does something unsanitary with your food, a million other people will see it. Cooks would love to snitch on a waitress for sneezing in your salad, because while that waitress was gruff with us, we weren't up front to hear the chewing out that you gave her, so our sympathies will be with the customers over the servers.
• Cooks generally don't do unsanitary things either. In the entire time I've worked in restaurants, I've seen cooks get mad, but I have never witnessed anyone spit in the food, or do anything gross with it. The risk is too high that you'd be disciplined. Most restaurants have conscientious people who'd be fine tattling on those who commit willful violations of the health code. Yours truly is one of these folks.
• Unless the restaurant is visibly dead, the chances are high that your server has no chance of coming up with enough time to mess with your credit card.  If you're mean to your server for no reason, they would rather ignore you and focus on the other customers more, to maximize their tips there. It's pretty darn rare to see a server go out of their way to get even.
• We remake things constantly. If there's a finished dish that turns out bad in some small way that we can't put right very quickly while it's still hot, we will redo the whole damn thing, because if it's going to reach your table looking good, it has to come out of our window looking superb.
• Cooks very rarely put out food that they know is inedible. If you say it's cold or it's gotten crusty on the top, the odds are 5:1 that your server simply let it sit and didn't run it to the table promptly after we made it. We want to do it right the first time because we don't want to have to remake it.
• Managers let cooks throw away food that isn't good. If you tell a manager that you simply wouldn't feel conscientious to sell something, because you think it's ugly or nasty, they will back down and eat the loss of product, because it says something to have a cook stand up for the quality of the food.
• If you give your server a complicated order, and it's made wrong, the odds are 3:1 that the server didn't understand. I cannot count the number of times that a server has come back apologizing that they need us to remake that order that just had a bunch of modifications, because he didn't get it right the first time.
• DO tip your server poorly if the food is cold. This will force the server to have some kind of an incentive to get the food to you hot. They are supposed make sure the food is good before it leaves the window. If it wasn't hot when they grabbed it, they shouldn't have grabbed it!
• DO NOT tip your server poorly for saying that we can't make a specific modification. If you want the tortilla soup without onions, I beg your pardon, but it's impossible because there's a million tiny chunks floating around in it, and that is not your server's fault.
• Feel free to ask any and all questions about our recipes. If most of the cooks don't know, then they will ask the most experienced one, and then they'll all have to learn something. It's a win-win.
• Don't assume that it has to be made fresh to be good. Every single dessert we make at my restaurant comes to us frozen, but the German chocolate cake is the best I've ever had. Welcome to the 21st century- we have amazing technology nowadays. If it tastes good, and if your palate isn't put off by any artificial flavor, then it ought to be good enough.
• Know your allergies before you come in. If you have an allergy to nuts, don't order any desserts, since the dust could be in any of the dessert toppings. Don't ask me to ensure that no allergens could possibly contaminate your body, because you take the same risk walking out the front door every morning. I can't sanitize life for you.
• Salads aren't made days earlier! I have never heard such rubbish in my entire life. A 3-day old salad would be disgusting. Iceberg starts to go orange on the corners in maybe 30 hours, romaine will start to get brown spots in 2 days. I have never worked in a restaurant where a single portion of salad wasn't made and then sold in less than 12 hours, even if they were pre-made and then wrapped in a case. At my current restaurant, we sell so many salads that during our dinner rush, they are virtually made at the time of ordering, and the salad mix is made twice a day. And even THEN we sometimes have to throw out product that isn't fresh enough. We want our salads to look as good as you would ever care to make yourself at home using ingredients you just bought from the market.
• Nobody wears gloves unless they like the feel of them. 70% of pantry cooks (who make salads) do not wear gloves ever. Those who do wear glove don't change them often enough. But how often do you get sick from eating a salad? I'm kinda disdainful of the notion of wearing gloves as long as you wash your hands regularly and touch only sanitary things. We're cooks and we only touch food, but you might not even wash your hands before you eat, when your hands could have been anywhere.
• Cooks don't clean the bathrooms in the dining room. If the bathroom isn't clean, that has absolutely nothing to do with the cleanliness of the kitchen. To say that the cleanliness of a bathroom has any bearing on the sanitation of the kitchen is silly.
• I've never even heard of powdered eggs outside of "waiter secrets" lists. At Mama Fu's we used liquid eggs, which tasted fine. At Steak n Shake we used real eggs: there were HUGE cartons of them in the walk-in.
• "9 times out of 10, if your food takes a long time to come out, it's the kitchen's fault and not the server's." By my personal experience, servers make exactly twice as many mistakes as kitchen staff do. And go back and read my comment about how often we remake food. If it took a long time, I'd give 3 most likely reasons: 1) we're just plain busy and couldn't go much faster; 2) the server misunderstood you and we had to remake a mistake; 3) the cook didn't look at the ticket closely enough, and we had to remake a mistake.
• I read once that servers at casual dining restaurants earn a median income of $8.01 after including tips. That's horseshit: they don't have to report their cash tips if they bank personally. They can claim that they made $50 in tips when they made $100. Saves on taxes and makes them look poorer than they really are.
• The original purpose of tipping was to provide feedback and reward really good behavior by servers. If you tip servers at 15% regardless, you might be subsidizing lazy servers at the expense of really excellent ones. I feel free to give mediocre tips if they did a mediocre job that they should have been trained to avoid. I am not a tough or complicated customer, and if a server screws up big time, I am not afraid to stiff. Servers get 80% or more of their income from customers, with little or no management oversight. Managers won't know that there's a problem with a server's performance, or some hidden excellence, unless you show them exactly how you feel by giving a tip that reflects it.