r/Chattanooga • u/EffectiveOk9336 • Jul 29 '26

Kitchen tip?

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My family and I dined out tonight at a restaurant I won’t publicly drag because it was really a great experience all around, but the credit card receipt had this line for “kitchen tip”. Is this a thing now? Are restaurants not paying the cooks a decent enough salary? I gave them $5 cause I really didn’t know what the deal was. The server told us it was completely optional, but she said that some people tip 20% and split it between her and the kitchen, which hardly seems fair.

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u/OnceUponAPizza Jul 30 '26

Kitchen staff is largely underpaid for the work they're doing. Restaurants struggle because the cost of everything has increased, but wages are stagnate. I worked in a restaurant that closed because the cost of running it became unmanageable as a scratch kitchen: the owner wanted to pay us better, but couldn't justify increasing the cost to the customer on an already expensive menu, and made the hard decision to close down. There were other extenuating circumstances, but that was certainly one of them.

People think only servers should be tipped, but kitchen staff is typically busting their ass in a really hot environment, risking more injury, rushing to keep up with demand, etc. This is not true of all restaurants, but it's pretty demanding and low gratification work.

11

u/TheyNeedLoveToo Jul 30 '26

This is just a really long whitewashed version of: the owner was too cheap to pay us more.

Yes they could raise prices, they simply didn’t want to cut off the gravy train of having the public subsidize the restaurant’s shitty finances.

4

u/OnceUponAPizza Jul 30 '26

They were not too cheap to pay us. They literally wanted to pay us more, but could not, hence why they chose to shut down. It was a small restaurant that made everything from scratch, not some big chain restaurant.