Matters of taste

Thanks to an absurd new ruling, any tip or service charge you pay will now almost certainly enrich the restaurateur. It is best to tip in cash and in secret
January 14, 2007
The tipping point

Tipping in restaurants originated, possibly, in the 18th-century coffee houses of London, on whose tables stood jars marked "To Insure Promptitude." In modern Britain, tipping and service charging are principally used to boost a restaurant's untaxed income, enabling proprietors to cover hidden costs and wriggle round laws on the minimum wage. This infuriating and unjust practice has now been enshrined by an inexplicable ruling from the tax authorities in the restaurant-owners' favour. It reverses a policy set in 2004, when, to the delight of tippers and poorly paid waiters, the inland revenue ruled that tips should not count towards the minimum wage—and if employers diverted money from tip-pools or service charges to waiters' salaries, they should pay national insurance contributions on the sums involved.

That seemed very reasonable, and it should have ended the much-resented practice whereby restaurants lean on customers to double-tip, by adding automatic "optional" service charges to bills (the "optional" was itself a tax-dodging mechanism). It did end the entirely unfair practice of employers snooping on the division of the tronc—the traditional pool of tip money—among their staff and using the cash to raise salaries without paying NI contributions.

But HM revenue and customs, lobbied hard by the restaurant industry, reversed the decision in late October. Its only new stipulation is that management can't interfere in the allocation of the tronc (though it may "advise" on it). But the money that low-paid staff get from it can be used to push their salaries over the minimum wage threshold and NI contributions won't be due—which of course hurts the employee's future pension. A new look at the law has been half-promised by the treasury—but the trade will vociferously oppose any further change while they labour under a full VAT rate (unlike restaurant-owners in most other European countries).

Tippers—and scrooges—should bear a few things in mind. British restaurants are enjoying an unprecedented boom, not least because of the flow of young, cheap labour from elsewhere in the EU. If a tronc system is in operation, any tip you give will almost certainly be in part a further gift to the restaurateur. Cash tips have fallen off drastically now that most people pay with plastic. And waiters' wages are pathetic—jobs for experienced staff in London restaurants command £13-15,000 a year. The minimum wage is £5.35 an hour; for those under 22 it is only £4.45. And the exploitation of migrant workers in the restaurant and hotel trade is now so bad that it has attracted the interest of the Anti-Slavery Society. So before you pay a service charge, ask how much of it the waiter will see, and if you do want to encourage promptitude and other old-fashioned civilities, tip in cash and in secret.


Bringing home the bacon

In my second attempt at prosciutto crudo di Lothian, I have completed the salting and the meat is now hanging in a draughty garden shed on Edinburgh's Calton hill. I believe this is the furthest north that anyone—homesick Roman soldiers on the Antonine wall?—has ever attempted to airdry a leg of ham Parma-style. But after carefully mixing the disparate advice of a postman in the Pyrenees, a pig farmer in Berwickshire, a Mancunian Italian who still deals in saltpetre despite its potential use in bomb-making, and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, I'm fairly confident it's going to work. By early summer I'll have slivers of mahogany prosciutto crudo to drape over the new season's Gala melons. My first attempt went wrong not because the westerly gales were too moist but because of Edinburgh's amazingly insistent bluebottles. The neighbours were very nice about the fallout, but this time the ham is shrouded in mosquito netting.


Ramsay takes Manhattan

Gordon Ramsay, Britain's most successful chef-restaurateur, appears to have succeeded in his attempt to conquer New York. Early reviews of his first US outpost, a £2.6m 45-seater in a midtown hotel, range from excitable to adulatory, and this most critical of food cities seems to have bought the various Ramsayisms: the chef's table, the waitering done largely by female British school prefects, the caramelised veal sweetbreads. They're flattered, too, that for the moment Ramsay is actually in the kitchen four nights a week, which is not something he can achieve at his nine London restaurants. But above all they are thrilled by how cheap it is compared to most haute cuisine places in Manhattan: the à la carte dinner is priced at just $80 for three courses.

We'd be thrilled too: dinner at the three-Michelin-star Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in London, on which the NYC restaurant is based, is £85—twice as much. Of course, the cheap food reveals the only real novelty that Ramsay is introducing to the US (other than the gambit of becoming a television chef there before actually opening a restaurant): the notion of solid fare as loss leader. Ramsay has long been open about the fact that his profit comes entirely from the wine list. But will this work in a city that doesn't drink in anything like the manner or quantity that London does?