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May 5, 2009

There is a stooshie going on at the moment as the government tries to regulate the laws regarding tipping in restaurants. The Independent has been running a campaign for a few months now to try to ensure that restaurants don’t use tips to make up staff pay to the minimum wage. It is a practice followed by a significant proportion of restaurants but by no means all of them.

As a diner, my natural assumption is that any tip I leave goes directly to the staff. It doesn’t always work like that and, as ever, it’s not a black and white issue. You can follow the latest skirmish in the battle here.

The very first time I set foot in New York, I committed the cardinal sin of not tipping a barman for a round of drinks. If looks could kill then there would be a corner of Manhattan’s Toad Hall bar that was forever British. While the barman didn’t point out my error, everyone else in my group did and I was packed off back to the bar to issue a fistful of dollars and fulsome apologies.

Tipping is less of an emotive issue here. Diners are unlikely to be pursued down the street for leaving a 15% tip when their waitperson is convinced that they were worth at least 18%. It’s still a tricky business though. Do you still tip if the service has been fine but the cooking has been grim? It’s the waiting staff’s job to act as a diplomatic service between the kitchen and the customer but if either side decides to play hardball then it is the waiters who bear the brunt of it.

Unless the waiting staff have been really sloppy and uninterested then I try to tip 10-12%. Sometimes that feels too little and other times it feels too much. Perhaps it would all be easier if we adopted the French system where a service charge was automatically built into the cost of the meal? Just to add to the confusion, what would you do in the London restaurant Inamo where half of the waiter’s job is done by placing your order on a table top touch screen?