In every full-service restaurant there are two worlds: the Front of House…made up of servers and bartenders, and the Back of House…made up of cooks and dishwashers (with bussers and hostesses existing in the mist between).

The difference between these clans?  Mainly, if you bathe yourself before coming to work, you are FOH.  If you roll in looking like Mario Batali’s hairy taint, you are unquestionably BOH.  These are two separate cultures with two entirely disparate sensibilities…hygienically and otherwise (I kid…sort of).

We are not enemies, per se…nothing so extreme as that.  It would be more accurate to say that we are RIVALS…each rooting for the other’s success and well-being only to the extent that they are connected to our own.  Sure, we have to work together to achieve our respective goals, but it is never with full trust in the other’s investment or priorities.  

We do try to get along, though.  We are sporadically cordial in the workplace…sometimes we hang out after work…sometimes we playfully jab at one another on social media…other times a hot server sleeps with that Elmer Fudd-looking Chef de Cuisine and then spends the rest of her days adamantly denying that it ever happened when everyone knows that it did.  You know…that thing that happens everywhere and is in no way specific to anywhere that I have worked. (wink-wink)

We “parlay,” for lack of a better term (not always featuring the exchange of bodily fluids), but we inevitably return to our respective camps to bitch about what dicks the others are.  For most of my career, I have found this cultural cattiness childish and boring.  I am a grownup, after all, and like most grownups, I’ve got things to do and real shit to put my angst toward.

Then came the age of the tip pool.  

“Tip pooling” is when a restaurant collects all the tips received by FOH employees and divides them up between some or all of its employees based on some kind of points system determined by position and the number of hours worked (rather than the traditional “tip out” system where FOH gives their direct support personnel a portion of their tips).  

Sometimes this is done with FOH only, but the new thing is to include ALL hourly employees in the tip pool, including BOH workers.  Line cooks, prep cooks, dishwashers, glass polishers…even janitors and maintenance workers can be eligible for inclusion. 

Sounds great, right?  I mean, FOH has been making bank all of these years while BOH has been sweating their asses off in the kitchen for shit pay.  Time to balance the scales a bit, right?!?!?  You’ll hear words like “team” and “fairness” coming from the mouths of restauranteurs who employ this system, and they seemingly have a great point.  What could be wrong with spreading the wealth a bit?  Make life a little more livable for ALL restaurant workers.

Not so fast, comrade.

First, if you hear a chef/restaurant owner explaining the reasons for tip pooling and using those words I mentioned, know that they are lying at worst, and burying the lead at minimum.  You see, so-called “full-house tip pooling” lets restaurant owners reduce their BOH employees to minimum wage and make up the difference by stealing money from the servers and bartenders and using it to supplement BOH pay.  This allows their cooks and dishwashers to make a good wage while promoting BOH employee retention, all while…and this is the REALLY important part…the restaurateurs run incredibly low labor costs, resulting in increased profits for ownership.

*While I hear that some states have begun making this practice difficult or illegal, it is still the norm in full-house tip pool concepts.  

As for the issue of wanting BOH employees to be paid more fairly, it should be noted that there is no law on the books in any state, county, or city in the United States of America that puts a ceiling on how much restaurant cooks can be paid by their employer.  Own a restaurant?  Want your BOH employees to make more money?  PAY THEM MORE MONEY.  

Problem solved.  End of rant.  Let’s go to the pub and forget all this shit!  Yeah?

No?  Oh, right.  You want to pay them MY money…not yours.  

In the end, it’s about the personal greed of owners…not fundamental fairness or justice for the dish dogs.  

Second, and I am still amazed that I have to say this, but if you want to make server money instead of line cook money, BECOME A FUCKING SERVER.  

Oh, wait…you cannot, because you are socially retarded and can’t be trusted to personally interact with the public on whom we all depend to make our living.  That’s right…I forgot.

Which leads to my third and final point: our serving and bartending ancestors did not selfishly and unilaterally decide that our skill sets were more desirable/rare than others in the restaurant business and therefore that we and we alone deserved extra compensation in the form of gratuities…THE MARKET DID THAT.  

Got a problem with some restaurant employees getting tips and some not?  Take it up with the restaurant-frequenting public, junior.  Hey, some places have begun putting an extra tip line on guest credit card slips for them to leave a tip specifically and separately for the BOH.  A legitimately brilliant idea, except no one ever leaves anything, accomplishing only the opening for debate the intention of the tip-leaver, and the betrayal inherent in funneling tips to places they were not intended to go.

“Oh but Marcus, aren’t ALL the employees in a restaurant working towards the same goal?  Aren’t they ALL dependent on one another to make the final result of customer service possible?  And shouldn’t the money be therefore shared accordingly?”

No.  Fuck that.  Let me tell you a story…

In Tom Brady’s last season as the quarterback of the NFL’s New England Patriots, his base salary was $23 million.  His center (the player charged with snapping the quarterback the ball and protecting him from the defense thereafter) was a man named Ted Karras.  Tom Brady could not do his job without Ted Karras.  Ted’s job is essential to Tom’s success.  Without Ted, there would be no Tom…no championships, no weird strawberry-free diets, no horse-faced ex-supermodel ex-wives…none of it, because there would be no football at all.

Ted Karras, the man who made Tom Brady rich and famous and weird, made $630,000 dollars in Tom Brady’s last season in New England.  I’m no mathematician, but I’m pretty sure that is about 1/36th the amount of money paid to his quarterback that same year.

Why?  

Because there is no tip pool in professional fucking football.  

In football, as in nearly every other professional endeavor, people are paid according to their skill and experience, the value of each determined by the market for people with those skills and experiences.  The Patriots didn’t take Tom Brady’s salary and spread it out to the centers and fullbacks and strength trainers and ball boys and hotdog slingers and parking attendants because each of those positions had been individually value-rated by the local and/or national market and compensated individually according to those valuations.  

In short, a football player who can do everything a quarterback is required to do is more valuable to the market than a player who can eat enough every day to weigh 300 pounds but still move around, and their pay is appropriately reflective of that.

So yeah, I said it…servers are Tom Brady and dirty line cooks are Ted Karras, but with one GIGANTIC difference: despite my earlier critique of the social skills consistently displayed by the BOH clan, cooks CAN learn to talk to people and become FOH and make FOH money. Ted Karras can’t suddenly be better at throwing a football than he is at eating pastrami and become a quarterback instead of a center and get paid quarterback dollars.  

One is impossible…the other is not.  

But BOH don’t want to do that.  They don’t want to get a better paying job; they want to do the job they want to do, but make the money associated with a completely different job…like a fucking child who wants to be a marine biologist AND a zillionaire!  Restaurant-owning chefs decided to enable this happy horseshit and give them that money, but not at their own expense…rather, at the expense of servers and bartenders…at MY expense…and the practice is growing in popularity.  

It is…at long last, and admitted red-faced and tight-jawed…the future of the restaurant business.   How could it be any other?

And so came the end of my longstanding personal détente with those disgusting culinary gutter punks.  Sorry, Anthony.  You can make your BOH clan out to be pirates and gypsies or whatever other romantic bullshit you care to (and if you were not dead, I feel confident that you would be).  I just see a bunch of hair-netted hobos who steal my fucking money.

So, I guess pirates and gypsies, then.  

You were right.  My bad.