When I was younger, idealistic, and somewhat deluded, my dream was to cook in a small bistro of my own. Eventually, I stopped ignoring the siren call of the restaurant industry, dropped all other professional endeavours, and decided to explore it further. In past observations, the most crucial pillar of success had appeared to be an ongoing dialogue between the front of house (dining room) and the back of house (kitchen). So I found a restaurant that inspired me and tried to immerse myself in both worlds.
I think that waiting tables should get an award for being one of the most difficult jobs in the world. The kitchen was a walk in the park by comparison; I'd still take the burns and knife cuts, the clatter and hiss, the long hours and the smell of fried shallots emanating from my pores over the volatility of the public domain. The dining room was a mosh pit of snarling, hungry wolves in white merino; demands, escapades and tantrums that ranged from the tedious to the absurd.
Managing the dining room of a Michelin-starred restaurant is not as glamorous as it may sound. Still, no matter how good a manager may be, a restaurant is run by an entire team. And if you hope to dine out regularly, you will want to have good servers in your corner. Wait staff are the under-represented stalwarts of the service industry. In all models of restaurant greatness, from crab shacks to degustation menus, the lowest common denominator is the same: happy, well-fed and informed staff who are paid well (usually higher than the industry standard) with good work incentives and regular, competent on-the-job training. At the end of the day, the success of a restaurant hinges much more heavily on great service than on great food.
Good service is a guarded and precise ballet. It's the jewel in a restaurant's crown, and good waiters are the kings and queens of their domain; they are part performance artists, part mental acrobats and part therapists to the masses. In varying degrees of heroic self-containment, your waiter has to be able to finesse public displays of idiocy with levity and grace while balancing hot plates, describing the soup du jour, deciphering body language, and assessing which patrons need to be upsold, coddled or just plain left alone.
In Japan, where restaurant tipping is verboten, the word used for the rare circumstances under which one is tipped means "to pay from the heart". Perhaps it would behove those of us living in the heart of capitalism to share more Japanese values and quiet pride. Scores of others prefer the calculator-free method of the French: service included. In countries where tipping is practised heavily, it is accompanied by a high incidence of service workers expected to do anything for patrons - and with the right tip this can often be accomplished.
I've heard arguments from those who believe that tipping is optional in the UAE and the US. Well, it's not. Some people are misguidedly convinced that it is not the customer's responsibility to pay the staff's wages, without realising that tipped workers have a lower statutory minimum wage to compensate for their supplemented income. Others complain that they should not have to pay a fixed percentage of the food they choose to order: why should they have to shell out a bigger tip to be presented with an order of duck confit than the same cafe's chicken sandwich? Most societies, including ours, are meritocratic when it comes to tipping. While the amount of a restaurant server's tip is discretionary, there are guidelines: in the US, it's now 20 per cent, while in the UAE, it's closer to 15 per cent. Think you can't afford that much? Then you can't afford to eat out.
There are a few misconceptions responsible for determining how and when people tip. The first thing worth remembering is why we eat out to begin with: for the pleasure, convenience or luxury of having someone else cook and serve us food. The real cost of running a restaurant is far higher than it may seem, and most restaurants operate on a very slim profit margin. Finally, don't shoot the messenger. When the line cook overgrills your steak, spare your server the rant; besides, you'll be more likely to get what you want if you ask nicely.
How people handle the exchange of money and all the ramifications and sensitivities of those transactions can inform us a great deal about them. But there is no rule of thumb in the UAE, and that can be confusing, particularly during a time of economic flux. The subculture of the restaurant world is one where staff are on the clock while the rest of the working world is easing into its off hours. That said, many of the people preparing and serving our food could never afford to eat it themselves, and often don't know what it is supposed to look or taste like. And if the customer's not happy with the experience, it's going to be reflected in the tip. Also, examine the bill before you tally the tip for any hidden service charges purportedly to be pooled among the staff and split accordingly. I tend to think of pooling tips as a socialist practice which seems antithetical to the meritocratic concept of tipping to elicit better service, and prefer to leave a cash tip - or speak with the troncmaster - instead.
Though it no longer happens, I have had rare occasions when I have been mortified by a friend's or colleague's public treatment of waitstaff. We can't all be Buddha all day every day, but we also don't need to walk a mile in someone's shoes in order to imagine how they may feel. Waiting tables is hard work. Doing it well is harder. So if you're wondering whether your tip is too low, it probably is. Take care of your server and in return you will be taken care of as well.