I’m not American so this could be wrong, but I have heard over the years that waiters get tips from customers but the chefs don’t? If this is true, how are there any restaurants not on fire right now?
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Places I’ve worked would split part of the tips with the cooks, a proper chef can get paid pretty well hourly sometimes. Average cooks don’t make much but will get free food which can help, when I worked in a ramen place I ate better than ever with all the tofu, rice and veg I could eat. But there is really high burn out and turn over rate among the food industry here, it’s a tough job even if you do get alright tips.
Depending on the establishment, head chefs are fairly decently paid. Their underlings are kept in line with the hope of progressing to becoming a head chef or fear of not being able to survive without their jobs. Plus, cooks eat.
Have a friend that worked in a high end restaurant who complained incessantly how much more the waiters made.
Checks out, I worked as a line cook at a Dennys for about six months and I quit that job in part because of how demoralizing it was - worked my fukken ass off and I was one of the worst paid people in the building.
Generally no, but there are endless variations. Most places in the US that do tips only have tips for front of house. If they split tips, usually some form of servers split 40-50% of all tips, bartenders get a percent of that based on drink orders, hosts split 5%, dishwashers split 10%, line split 10%, etc. I think this is more common in states that have higher minimum wages because in some US states servers only get $2 an hour for labor and the rest comes from tips, which is why they don’t usually split those as much with back of house who have minimum wage ($7.25) or higher
Are these percentages of splitting tips put down formally in a contract?
Not usually from what I’ve seen, there is a common point of exploit in the restaurant world where an owner or supervisor will skim money from what should go to the tipped workers because only they know the cash tip total, places will have laws making that illegal but it still happens plenty. Some people I know like the informal tip system though because they will get part of their pay in cash which they can more easily avoid paying taxes on.
It depends, some restaurants probably do that but many probably don’t
In a lot of food/drink service environments there are multiple rolls in both the front of house (workers who interact with the customers, or who are in the publicly-accessible spaces) and back of house (workers who are in the kitchen, office, or who work at times when customers are not around).
Even within the front of house workers, the person who collects the tip is often the one who completes the interaction by taking overall payment. Especially in situations where it is customary to wait until the end to pay in one lump sum for everything. (can be different by region or subculture.)
There is a practice called “tip out” where the people who collect the large payments share with others who contribute to the overall service. It could be bussers, hosts, bar staff and so on in the front. In the back, chefs, cooks, prep, dishwashers even admin could get tip out. Management (aside from chefs) takes tip out in some places but this is not very respectable.
My understanding is that the tip out is often reflective of the overall culture of the workplace. A friendly, supportive workplace have a more equitable tip out. It always seems that there is some discretionary nature of tip out on the part of the front of house staff. Some places it is up to that person to decide. Other places there is strong social pressure to conform to a tip out practice. Of course, since tips are informal, it is somewhat up to the collecting worker to accurately report the tips and share the correct %. But if someone is seen to be dishonest in this, they’ll have a bad time at work.
Also in some places, some workers will pool all their tips for a given shift and re apportion them according to a structure. So if there are 3 servers working and 1 gets a big table, it is shared between them. That might include other roles or might not. And it could be an informal arrangement only between certain friendly workers.
Coming from a Danish context, so tips aren’t a big deal for our wages, but every restaurant I’ve worked, there has been a tip-sharing system of some sort, usually based on hours, roles and number of employees.
Last month I got around 500$ in tips as a chef, and I think it goes something like 70/30 in favor of FoH. When I was working at a hotel it was more like 60/40, but we had more employees too, so my share was usually more like 100$ a month.
It’s also way better for cohesion having tips be pooled and split based on hours and not just luck or having horny customers trying to impress their date or the waitress. Less drama overall and no bullshit like only the person bringing the bill gets the tip or whoever the customer perceives as most worthy. It should honestly just be formalized into a sort of mandatory profit sharing or bonus and written into the contract, but then again, most restaurant workers are less than 0% organized and will never strike or call the union lol. Managers still steal tips here of course, along with a bunch of assorted wage theft.
Depends on the restaurant.
When I worked in fast food I was busting my ass off in a hot kitchen in the middle of July for $7.25/hr.
We accepted tips but it only went to the customer service rep that took their order.
I also worked at another fast-food-chain-bakery where employees were paid ~$11/hr, but they started accepting tips so they brought it down to $8/hr.
Those tips were shared in a pool, but if I’m being honest I didn’t ever make over $9/hr.
