MOIRA
So, Claire, do you tip?

CLAIRE
Not always. Moira, do you tip?

MOIRA
At restaurants, almost always.

CLAIRE
Why at restaurants exclusively?

MOIRA
I mean I would consider a wine bar a restaurant. But if I’m ordering up at a counter, like a bar or a pub, I probably wouldn't tip. I think it has something to do with table service. Table service and the amount of interaction that I have with the service staff.

CLAIRE
So when you tip, are you tipping for service?

MOIRA
Yeah, I reckon, predominantly for service.

CLAIRE
I would say I’m tipping exclusively for service. It’s only recently that tipping for the quality of the food has even come into my mind’s eye.

MOIRA
Agreed. I would assume that the price of the food on the menu is reflective of the amount of the quality of the ingredients used and the time and skill that it takes the chefs to prepare said meal.

CLAIRE
I’m obsessed with you saying reflective and said meal. You know what I was thinking about? Do you remember when you would get the flatbread with that soft cheese at Marion, and it would be free?

MOIRA
Oh, shit.

CLAIRE
Life used to be crazy. Free bread. God, bread used to be free.

MOIRA
These days, I would tip if the bread was free. I’d tip if sparkling water is free.

CLAIRE
Okay, anyway, back to the point. Tipping, to me, is for service. I’m tipping for a combination of care and skill and making the experience greater than just talking to them and ordering. That, to me, is what I tip for.

MOIRA
Let me give you a hypothetical situation. The service is amazing. The food is great.

CLAIRE
Yeah.

MOIRA
The kitchen has gone down, and your food takes an hour to come. There’s an hour between your entreé and your main. Do you tip?

CLAIRE
Fascinating. Because I’m like, to me, wait time is a component of the service. Oh, moy caliente. That is a spicy one. I guess there have been times where I’ve waited a long time between food and have still thought the service was good. So I guess, no. Yes, I would tip, and no, it wouldn’t impact it. There is something about, and I know that I say this all the time of touching the table because I just love the term. I think it sounds so camp. But there is a component of feeling like the most annoying thing about going out to dinner and getting service that you don’t like is that you feel like you’re not being thought of when you’re sitting there and you’re like, can I get a glass of wine? Can we chat? Can I get those mashed potatoes? What’s happening? And if the service is good, and it is taking an hour, and they know these things. I think a good waiter comes to you before that’s happening and is like, yes, how are we going here?

MOIRA
You’re anticipating what someone needs, and it’s this idea of care, right? Dare I say hospitality. The idea that the person who’s serving cares about whether you’re having a good time, which involves touching tables, keeping track of how time is flowing. For example, if the food is taking a while, I’ll communicate that to a table.

CLAIRE
The kitchen’s at capacity.

MOIRA
The kitchen’s at emotional capacity. "Your food is actually going to be 20 minutes." "I’m sorry." "Here’s a half glass of something while you wait." That bit of communication makes a difference.

CLAIRE
That is a tip in and of itself, because that is actually the thing that you notice so much more in regards to good and bad service is that feeling of bothering the people. That’s the yuck feeling that you hate when you go out to dinner. It’s feeling like you’re a burden, which is like the exact opposite of hospitality.

MOIRA
That’s so millennial of you. But yeah. It is. There’s nothing worse when someone’s like, "Hey, can I tell you the spiel?"

CLAIRE
And it’s always, “We do things a little differently around here.”

MOIRA
Damn. Like, 70% front of house. And I know the chef bros are about to come with me with their fucking pairing knives with their tweezers. But I don’t know. You and I have very specific experiences of dining out and what that looks like. As, like, if I come into a situation where I feel like I understand the social cues or I understand the rules that we’ve created around this, and you do your dance and I do my dance, and then I leave, tipping to me, is that extra bit that.

CLAIRE
So, do you think the tips should be split up? As someone who benefits from said tips.

MOIRA
I’ve worked in a big four restaurant group and had a percentage of my tips go towards the owner and the head office which is like, kinda fucked lol. It’s not uncommon to see businesses to take 5% of that for glass breakages, which I don’t think is as fucked. I’ve worked in places that do an even split with everyone working, front of house and back of house. I think 70/30 is fair.

CLAIRE
More than an even split?

MOIRA
So I was going to say was that when I came back to work in a restaurant, I had long-COVID and I was having a shit time at work. I never sunk my section, I did all the things that I was supposed to do but there was no flirting.

CLAIRE
Well, also, there was no jazz hands. There was no razzle dazzle.

MOIRA
Yeah. We were using square terminals, which meant that you’d get a report with your tips. I reckon during that time, I was making 60 bucks in tips at the end of the night when I’d normally make like 200 bucks? And I think it’s something front of house maybe have more influence on a tip going in than back of house?

CLAIRE
That is interesting data also. That’s the data that proves my point that I really think that societally, we have decided that this is a cream of the crop extra thing.

MOIRA
But it’s work. Performing good service, doing those extra things is labour. We don’t actually have to put a candle in your cake when you tell us it’s someone’s birthday. We don’t have to stress over you having a full glass of water at all times. Or over you getting your first drink before your snacks hit the table. We didn’t have to spend years learning about wine so that we could help you pick a glass of wine that matches your understanding of the word ‘funky’ and goes well with your food.

CLAIRE
So as to why 80/20. I think this comes down to emotional labour like, there’s doing your job in hospitality, following the sequence of service, touching all your tables. That’s doing your job. And then there is putting the cream on top of the cake, as you had said, which is like, I’m going to connect with this person and I’m going to make them feel good. The Bear, literally, this is what The Bear is about, where you’re going above and beyond, and you’re tailoring that person’s dining experience to make them have a better time. But can you imagine a world where every single time you went to a restaurant in the three to six times per week that you tipped 15%?

MOIRA
I wouldn’t be able to afford to go out.

CLAIRE
You wouldn’t be able to.

MOIRA
The percentages thing is so interesting because like, I’m never really like, was the service worth 10% of the meal or 20%, it’s more like I think that people should tip because it makes a difference to what Melbourne hospitality and service looks like. If it weren’t for tips hospitality, it’d be hard to make hospitality a long-term career. Hospitality award rates for full-timers is less than 25 an hour? And maybe just over 30 for casual workers? So what, 50–60K? Tips can bump that up to like 90K and it’s partly to do with building skills so you can work in restaurants that get you tips.

CLAIRE
So how do you tip?

MOIRA
I’d say like blanket rule, 5 bucks per person if someone’s done anything that I see as doing more than just taking my order and bringing food from the kitchen to the table. Or I’d round the bill to a nice looking number.

CLAIRE
I think dining in 2023, 2024, or the modern world or whatever that looks like, that landscape doesn’t leave room for tipping at every situation, because dining out isn’t what it was. Do you know what I mean? It feels like that wicked capitalist problem of being, like, we have surpassed this thing’s initial perceptions or ideas or like, what this was originally built for, and it’s become too big of a beast, or too. Like, it’s become more than the sum of its parts, and we can’t sustain what it was in the same way that we could before because of the fact of the concept of how we wish to see the world and our actual lived experience can’t. Those two things are very rarely a full circle. A Venn diagram.

MOIRA
I think that if you are dining out on a gift card from your 30th birthday, on your engagement party–

CLAIRE
How dare you come for me so personally.

MOIRA
Well, where you’re not personally paying for the meal, you should tip. And this also includes people who are using the company card.

CLAIRE
On the company card. Every meal. I think that is embarrassing if you don’t. Honestly.

MOIRA
God if you’re some white food influencer profiting and gaining cultural capital from sharing your quote-unquote expertise and review of food from a culture that isn’t yours, especially if it’s from a marginalised culture and you’re not tipping, you should think about that.
Claire, how much do you tip?

CLAIRE
Absolutely not by percentage, unless I get that weird prompt where it’s like 5, 10, 15, and it tells you how much it is. I’m always doing the mental math kind of rounding up to numbers or rounding up to ideas of what I think is a budgeted concept. So I think that chucking, like $10 or $15 or $20 onto something in.

MOIRA
What’s the social etiquette with groups? Would you ask the crowd, would you just add it on?

CLAIRE
That is a fascinating question because I’m usually the person that gets the bill and does the thing. Does the. I can’t think of a lot of times where I’ve been like, are we tipping? If I do it, I’m just like, I tipped this much. If I were going to dinner with people and I knew that they famously didn’t tip, I would tip.

MOIRA
Cop the tip. Hot of you.

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