Tonight:
5°c
An optional gratuity of 15 per cent has been added to your bill.” Thirteen words to put a song in your heart, aren't they? They dare you to ask for it to be removed, knowing fine well you won't.
Even when I've spent 15 minutes waving my arms and coughing before the waitress noticed me, even when I've waited hours for horrible food in inadequate portions, I've never had the brass neck.
Imagine the surly or, worse, wounded face on the waitress. Imagine stammering your explanation. Imagine the bill snatched from the table and returned, with theatrically leaden steps, to the till.
But now I'm going to start doing just that. My gratuities will be voluntary, and they will be in cash, and the explanation will be: “Because I'm tipping you, not your employer.”
New legislation supposed to ensure that restaurants can't use tips to make up staff pay has “a loophole”, apparently: restaurants will still be entitled to keep the tips for themselves.
Describing that as “a loophole” is like describing Caroline Flint's resignation letter as “a bit undignified”.
At present, restaurants often seek to hoodwink customers by saying the tips they collect “are distributed among the staff”. “Distributed among the staff” they might well be — but as part of their hourly wage rather than, as you would have been entitled to suppose, in
addition to it.
Employees at the Strada chain of pizza restaurants, it was reported yesterday, are paid only £2.50 an hour by the company — the rest of their £6.50 hourly wage being made up by tips.
In order to have their customers subsidise their wage-bill for them, the company relies on those customers imagining that it's their waiter, rather than the bottom line, that they're doing a favour.
According to an unnamed Strada manager quoted in The Observer: “If a waiter consistently tells customers what happens to the service charge they will be disciplined and eventually sacked.”
An internal memo from Strada's
parent company, Tragus, which also owns Café Rouge, tells managers to monitor how much staff collect in tips and demand explanations if it's too low.
I'm sure this is all within the rules. But what a grubby, shabby way for a business in the so-called service industry to behave.
Eating out is not an ordinary transaction. Cooking and sharing food is a primal social experience, at the root of human civilisation — and that is encoded in the system of tips, a personal expression of thanks.
Tragus's policy — and that of the many other restaurants that follow its example — takes this civilising exchange and turns it into its opposite.
It asks its managers to invigilate their waiting staff, and waiting staff to conspire in keeping their customers ignorant.
Personally, I've eaten my last overpriced croque monsieur at Café Rouge.
Sr'Alan's way with sullen types
Lordy, I didn't see that coming. Did you? In the final of The Apprentice, the dark-haired sullen one beat the beaming fashion-plate with expensive hair.
The task involved selling a box of chocolates. Expensive hair produced something slick and flashy.
Dark and sullen — looking with every frame more suicidal — invented a brand of horrid-tasting chocs that give you electric shocks. Yet, unexpectedly, she triumphed.
Can Sir Alan work the same magic for another dark-haired and sullen article faced with similar opposition?
I'm not sure reality television and old-style reality work in quite the same way, unfortunately.
Victory — at a terrible price
It's very moving, to see old men with medals crying quietly at the graves of their friends. But the dignity of the act of memorial tempts us into an almost aesthetic pleasure: the moistened eye, the dignified phrase, the picturesque cemetery.
Reading Antony Beevor's new book on D-Day properly deflates that. What's striking is not only the good that Operation Overlord achieved, but the wastefulness with which it sprayed dead bodies around to achieve it.
We opened the festivities by sprinkling paratroopers with smashed ankles and broken spines across the Cotentin Peninsula; then we sent a lot of young men into a wall of machine-gun fire; then we bombed Caen half flat to negligible strategic effect. Even a just war, it tells us, is a horribly inefficient way of achieving something.
We will remember them. Better bloody hope so.
Clive loses the ladies'scent
The 68-year-old singer Anne Howells has described her 2005 affair with an Australian writer she calls “Clyde”. She says Clyde seduced her with the words “be my mistress”, liked to turn on the lights during sex, and kept up a running commentary on his own performance in bed.
Was “Clyde” Clive James? Miss Howells certainly seems to encourage us to think so. “Clyde”, indeed. It's not nice to ridicule an ex-lover, and it's feeble to do so in this coy, guessing-game way.
Miss Howells emerges diminished, while Mr James's reputation for comical goatishness is burnished. It's an appealing part of his schtick, anyway.
At the Devon literary festival Ways With Words a year or two ago, I was among a handful of guests who, under the influence of a Ukrainian novelist and several gallons of red wine, went for a late-night swim in the river Dart.
Scenting bare ladies, Clive announced he'd come along — but as a spectator. Alas, he got lost on the way, and our swim was soundtracked by Clive crashing through the forest, bellowing plaintively.
Reader views (1)
As a former employee of Strada, this has been the norm for many years. I was often only paid £2.50 by the company with the rest coming from the service charge. I am disgusted that most restaurants have got away with this for so long - what gives them the right to avoid paying their staff minimum wage and supplementing to make up the numbers? This should be illegal. Trajus, it's time to start treating your employees like human beings.
- Lisa, London, 10/06/2009 13:55
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