New Math At Some Restaurants

    Meanwhile, Ms. Cocuzza still lives in Montauk and still is in the business, but now, she’s moved on to cateringprivate functions. She’s seen all sorts of restaurants in her day, but, she said, “I only like working with the old ones. I don’t like the whole new-aged setup that’s going on. It’s not fair.” She said she had “never worked a point” system, but had heard all about the griping that can come with them.

    Tom Allnoch, the manager of the American Hotel in Sag Harbor, acknowledged that it can be a tricky balancing act to keep everyone pacified when tips are pooled. “There is never anyone entirely happy,” he said. “Basically, you’ve got to pull your weight, and do your job. But there is always something going on.”

    Mr. Allnoch said he switched to a point system a few years ago. “The maximum points you can achieve is 10,” for a server, he said. “Busers get 5 at best, and a new front waiter will get 5, 6, up to 7 points” during an intense training period, “until he can cover his own section.”
    There can easily be more than 100 points to divide per night, when there are six waiters, six busers, three food runners, and two bartenders in the mix. Using a higher number of points, rather than assigning 2 per server and 1 per buser, as many other restaurants do, creates “a little wiggle room,” he said. “Everyone seems relatively happy with it.”

    “The buser tends to make half,” he elaborated. “It depends on what kind of staff you have. At the moment, we have a very good crew here.”
    Meanwhile, at the Palm in East Hampton, Thomas Romano, a manager, uses a more traditional system. There are servers, and then there are “assistant servers,” who fulfill the function of busboys and food runners. An assistant server, he said, is someone who wants to move up to server one day — but not before putting in time in the trenches.
    Seating 140, the Palm employs 9 or 10 waiters on a weekend night, with 4 assistant waiters. The waiters keep their own earnings, after tipping out between 20 and 25 percent to the assistants and bar combined, Mr. Romano said. Since one assistant is assigned to two waiters, they’re still making a decent amount of money.

    Back in Montauk, the Surfside is still using an old-school tip-out system, but now servers tip out a total of 30 percent, 10 each to the bus, bar, and runner. “Most of the time they pool,” said Helene Delaney, the manager, “but that’s up to the wait staff.”
Most of her servers, she said, have worked together so long they’d prefer to pool tips, watching one another’s backs and splitting the money at the end of the night.
There are only two busers at Surfside for six or seven servers, Ms. Delaney said. “I have an excellent wait staff. They’re trained to pick dishes up.”
At the Harvest on Fort Pond, which is on Emery Street, and at East by Northeast, across the way on Edgemere Road, both in Montauk, tips used to be divided as they are at Surfside. But for the past two years a point system has been in effect. “It varies,” said Rachel Goldberg, a manager for both restaurants. The number of points an employee receives is determined by the management and “can go anywhere from 5 to 20,” based on “experience, position, and work ethic.”
    At East by Northeast, there are a lot of new employees this year, Ms. Goldberg said, and the system creates an added incentive for them to perform better and earn a higher number of points. Servers are required to throw 15 percent of their total sales — as opposed to all tips or only tips — into the pool; if they make, say, 20 percent in tips that night they can do what they please with the extra 5 percent.
    But a point system, no matter how finely tuned, doesn’t work out for every restaurant. “It just doesn’t work in a place like this,” said Aubrey Farnham, a waitress at West Lake Clam and Chowder House in Montauk. “I don’t see how it works anywhere. It just doesn’t make sense.”
    West Lake has used a tidy, old-school system for the past decade. The waitresses pool their tips and give 15 percent off the top to their two busboys and 8 percent to the bar. “It’s such a small place,” said Rob Devlin, the owner. “When we’re busy, I run food, and bus the tables. If there’s food in the window — we’ve been together for so long here. Everyone works together. My chef runs food when it’s really busy.”

    Many other places collect tips and issue paychecks at the end of the following week, but at West Lake the servers take home their earnings at the end of the night — even their credit card tips.
    Another nuance of tip division, one requiring particularly subtle math skills, is the kickback a server is often expected to pay to credit card companies. Visa and MasterCard add a 2-percent surcharge on all sales to cover the use of their machines; American Express charges a bit more than that.

    Many restaurants deduct the surcharge from servers’ total credit card tips, although some servers aren’t aware of the difference when printing their reports at the end of the night. Others have a bone to pick with the logic that a waiter should relinquish earnings because their employer chooses to use credit card equipment.
     “I give them the full amount at the end of the night,” said Mr. Devlin, who eats the surcharges at West Lake himself. “I don’t take out the 2 percent. They work hard, and I want them to know I appreciate what they do.”

    When Raphael Riach, a bartender at West Lake, worked in Key West for a few winters, tip-outs were an intense process, he said. “There was a chart on the wall. Even if it was 1 percent, they got it at the end of the month,” he said. Clam-shuckers, expediters, kitchen help, busers, and hostesses were just some of the names on the chart. And despite the complicated compensation system, the waiters’ total tip-out was “probably between 25 and 28 percent.”
    In New York State, something like that wouldn’t fly. “The standard is that the tips can be split between anyone who has direct service contact with the customers,” said Jean Genovese, a spokesperson for the New York State Department of Labor. Management, owners, and people who work in the kitchen, from the dishwasher to the chef, should not be tipped out, she warned.
    But how the money is divided is a gray area. When asked if it was legal for a server to be required to relinquish half of their tip earnings, Ms. Genovese said she had “never heard of anything like that.”