Geoff Davis doesn’t want his employees to rely on tips.
The acclaimed chef, who worked in restaurants and cocktail bars in the Bay Area and wine country before opening Oakland soul-food restaurant Burdell, points out on customer receipts that tipping culture in the United States has a racist history — rooted in low-paid, relegated jobs among formerly enslaved black workers.
Instead of tips, his restaurant adds a 20% service charge to the bill. It takes the guesswork and luck out of the equation, Davis said, and helps stabilize wages in dining rooms and kitchens — where servers often get tips, but cooks and dishwashers don’t — and helps offset the cost of health care benefits offered to full-time employees.
Service charge is not an uncommon practice and is common among some high-end restaurants. And yet Davis’ restaurant has been the target of online hate in recent days, a wave of vitriol sparked by a now-deleted Reddit post with the service charge policy printed at the bottom of Burdell’s receipts.
“Tipping in the US has a sordid history of allowing underpaid labor to continue. We don’t like that history. Included on your check is a 20% service tax that we use to pay our hourly staff a consistent, livable wage that doesn’t depend on archaic tipping or chance practices. No need to add anything else. Thanks! Burdell <3," it reads.
Burdell, which was named the best restaurant in the U.S. by Food & Wine magazine in 2025, was immediately inundated with nasty reviews on platforms like Yelp, as well as angry, hateful and sometimes threatening emails, phone calls and direct messages on social media.
“I’m amazed why we’re held to a different standard,” Davis said. “We’re not doing anything crazy. We didn’t invent service charges.”
Davis said that when he implemented the service charge policy several years ago, he carefully considered the language to give a nod to the history of tipping without overwhelming customers with information. He “felt strongly” about acknowledging the history. At the same time, he said, he wanted to pay his staff competitive wages and provide health care coverage, which he felt he could accomplish with a mandatory service charge.
Davis said pay for his employees is generally about double the local minimum wage, which reached $17.34 in Oakland on Jan. 1. Full-time employees can get about 75 percent of covered health care, he said.
The Redditor whose comment sparked outrage posted on r/EndTipping, a subreddit dedicated to advocating “for a system where workers don’t rely on tips.” According to Davis, that’s what the service fee model is all about.
The poster wrongly claimed that the facility did not disclose the automatic charge in advance. The policy is prominently displayed on the Burdell’s menu and receipts do not include a tip line.
Still, the attack continued for weeks, even after Davis addressed the situation in a Feb. 4 Instagram post. In his post, he said that for years he worked in restaurants making below minimum wage — and watching the so-called front-of-house workers make far more than those working in the kitchen.
In many restaurants, lower-wage back-of-the-house workers are more likely to be Latino, black, or from other marginalized groups, while server positions are often filled by white people. A 2015 study by Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, a nonprofit labor advocacy group, found that waiters at high-end restaurants could earn up to five times more than employees who wash dishes, clean tables and prepare food in the same establishment.
“We received threats of violence, threats to burn down the restaurant, and just horrible, hateful e-mail,” Davis told The Times. “It’s tiring and scary, not just for me, but for our staff.”
Many Americans do not know that tipping is a legacy of slavery. Although the practice originated in feudal Europe and was brought to the United States by travelers, it flourished after the Civil War as American employers sought to avoid paying black workers who had been enslaved. The Pullman Co., which manufactured railroad cars, notoriously hired newly freed black men as porters, reduced their wages, and forced them to rely heavily on tips from white riders. The practice of tipping has entrenched a racialized class structure in hospitality jobs.
Although California for decades has required restaurants to pay the state’s minimum wage regardless of how much workers receive in tips, federal law continues to allow subminimum wages for tipped workers.
The federal minimum wage is $7.25, stuck there since 2009; the minimum wage with tips is much lower at $2.13. Employers of these tipped workers can use the customers to subsidize $5.12 of the company’s hourly wage obligation. Although many states have a minimum wage well above $7.25 an hour, many still have an exceptionally low minimum wage for tipped workers.
The advice debate remains contentious, and California lawmakers have wrestled with how to handle the imperfect service tax solution. Restaurants like Michelin-starred Taiwanese eatery Kato in downtown LA and Coucou in West Hollywood charge fees — 18 percent and 20 percent, respectively — high enough that diners don’t often feel the need to tip. Restaurants that charge less than 3% to cover healthcare may leave customers confused about how to proceed.
Legally, service charges are treated differently than tips: The former are the restaurateur’s property to distribute as they see fit, while tips are legally the property of the individual server.
Former servers at Jon & Vinny’s, a popular Italian-American restaurant with multiple locations in Southern California, filed a class-action lawsuit in 2023, alleging that their company refused to tip servers and take them home because of confusion over an 18 percent service charge. The cost prompted the restaurant to update the language on the bill to explain that the service charge was not the same as a gratuity.
In 2024, California considered eliminating service fees as part of legislation to ban “hidden” or “junk” fees, but rejected the proposal at the eleventh hour.
At the time, Kato’s owner, Ryan Bailey, told The Times that while some operators were “abusing the service tax”, most were distributing it fairly to provide benefits and compensate employees in a way that was “so extremely appropriate and responsible… that if it went away, it would be really crippling for everyone.”
Oakland and several other cities have passed ordinances requiring funds collected through service charges to be distributed among hospitality employees, not supervisors, and requiring restaurants to keep records in case of a city investigation.
Davis said many online commenters seemed to oppose both tipping and service charges, even as restaurateurs struggle to raise menu prices to keep up with rising food and rent costs.
“People want to have autonomy in how much they get to go [in tips]but our society doesn’t work like that,” Davis said. “The server that served you, if they forgot to refill your water, the rent is still owed to them and it’s not variable.
“People want advice so they can not advice. But we have to pay the labor somewhere.”
Davis says that while the flow of vitriol toward him and Burdell continued online, the community rallied around the restaurant. “People really come out and support and we’ve been very busy,” he said. “It really restored that belief and will to keep working.”
Times staff writer Stephanie Breijo contributed to this report.
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.