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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I once left my number for one of the waiters at Jim's Greek Tavern. It was my birthday and he was cute so I left a witty note with instructions to message me. At 1am, he messaged, telling me to come meet him and his girlfriend. I was 22, years away from my first threesome and shocked that my actions had consequences. I threw my phone across the room.

I was reminded of that instance the other day while enjoying a glass of wine and a particularly lovely little flirt with someone working behind the bar. After a lifetime working at local, family-run businesses where I know every customer’s coffee order and the state of their marriage, I never leave my number– even when the flirt is really good.


That’s just my stance. Many would disagree with me as the social rules are inconveniently unclear. In an attempt to create some clarity, I conducted some rigorous research (drunk conversations with colleagues) and collected a plethora of nuanced personal opinions with two clear rules everyone could agree on:

Rule No.1: Never verbally ask someone out or directly give them your number, simply leave a note on the table.
Rule No.2: Don't do it at your local, unless you are willing to lose it forever.
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There is so much at play in the dynamic between customer and front of house (FOH) staff. Hospitality is personal. When you enter a venue and take your place, you are sitting at someone’s table. The staff have invited you into their home, but not in a ‘we’ve just had three martinis and I’ve asked you back to my place’ kind of way. It’s more like you are a random plus-one at dinner in their house. Behave accordingly.


When done well, service is one of the most impressive performances you will ever see or be a part of. There is nothing quite like watching skilled staff weave their way around the stage of a restaurant holding grace, elegance and care in equal check with urgency and the threat of collapse. I will always revere the server who can fluff and fuck (to put it crudely) a customer into switching tables and have them coming out feeling like the Queen of Sheeba.


Venues are a theatre for care and conviviality that suspend, for a moment, the outside world or at least make it all seem far more palatable. The scene is set with low lighting and music. Doors open, patrons take their seats, and are welcomed to the show with a menu and the choice of still or sparkling. The curtain goes up. Act one: first drinks and the spiel. Act two: entrees, main, and dessert. Act three: a dance of delivered cheques, split payments, and hopes for gratuity. The curtain goes down, and tables are turned in time for the next sitting. It is an illusion, a magic trick, and as a customer, you have chosen to suspend belief and control.


When I am in good hands, I am happy to hand myself over to the experience as it is not all lights and mirrors. Good hospitality is, at its heart, one of the great acts of intuitive care. Food writer and cook Patience Gray describes hospitality as the ability to “discern precisely what your guests are in need of”. In her book Honey From a Weed, Gray sets the scene on a Greek terrace to describe the hospitality she experienced while living on Naxos. The lady of the house who seats people under her fig trees, rushes to provide chairs for both bums and tired feet. She stops the dust from rising up by sprinkling water around and serves glikó with a glass of water with basil. For Gray, this is what it is to be in good hands who are happy to hold you.


I believe this is the main reason people fall for FOH staff. If you think there may be a vibe with you and a staff member, it is probably because they have done their job well. You are all playing a role: theirs is to make you feel seen and attended to, yours is to be a good guest. A good FOH will lift the burden of decision-making and control while still giving you the illusion of agency. You will feel inspired to order another glass, though had they not made you feel comfortable, you would certainly have stopped at one.


We live in a world that makes it easier and easier for us to disconnect. So, when we are surprised, comforted and relieved by the seemingly personalised attention of a good FOH person, an orchestrated connection can be easily misinterpreted. Despite what the movies tell you, good hospitality is not someone smiling, nodding and telling you that you are always right. A former colleague of mine was followed to three different venues by a regular. He’d sent her messages on Instagram asking her out. It made her feel uncomfortable and unsafe. In a report recently released by Not So Hospitable, a grassroots campaign aimed at addressing sexual assault in the hospitality industry, similar testimonials from professionals working in Adelaide describe the disturbing prevalence of patrons breaking the fourth wall.


I would like to stipulate that I am not against romance or cheeky fun. I love a flirt and there are times when love is, indeed, in the air. So what do you do? As the rules above state, if you are so overcome and think you may have found some mutual affection to go with your wine, you may leave your number. I warn against doing it verbally. It will break the illusion and it is really awkward. Even if they feel the same, timing is everything. The timing is rarely right when someone is five hours into a 14-hour shift and under immense pressure. Good hospitality staff will be juggling numerous tasks and demands without you even knowing. Moments of fleeting connection occur amongst a heady scramble of calls from the kitchen, empty water glasses and expectant guests. Save your ego and their stress levels and just leave a cute note.  


If you are certain of your reciprocated connection, one final thing you must do before taking the plunge is ask yourself: is the potential of one night with them worth losing the restaurant, bar, or pub over? Remember Rule 2, because it absolutely will never be the same again. If you’re not convinced, watch season 8, episode 4 of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Not even Larry David could pull it off.


I haven’t spotted Dimmi at Jim’s Greek Tavern again. Too scared to bump into him, I waited a whole year before I went back. When I finally, did he wasn’t there. That, or I was too drunk and he was too busy for either of us to remember the other’s appearance. I got away with a light, one-year sentence and have thankfully been able to keep one of Melbourne’s best BYO’s on rotation.

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