TIPPING THE BALANCE ON GRATUITIES

When Evelyn Roff of Downey wrote in the July 2 column that she thought the whole practice of tipping was something of a sham (and there are many others out there who agree with her), and suggested that she’d rather stiff restaurant employees and give the money she saved to charity, this was the response:

A long, reasoned letter from Eric Greene, who has held the franchise for the International House of Pancakes in Arcadia for the past 20 years. I wish I had the room to reprint his words in full, but here are some excerpts:

“When I first started in this business, I too thought that the practice of tipping was unfair to the customer. In my young, inspired mind I was going to reform the restaurant industry. My theory was to put out the word to customers that henceforth we’d no longer tolerate the greasing of palms, the fawning for nickels and dimes on the part of the hired help. With table tents, newspaper ads, word of mouth and any other means we would inform the public that the price of a meal was just what was stated on the menu and that there would be no other charges. The accepting of tips by employees would be strictly forbidden. They would all be professionals, proud of their skills, and they would all be paid an adequate wage, negating the necessity of the tip.

“As I began to analyze my wonderful plan, though, it began to dawn on me that (if) we raised everyone’s pay to where it should be if they were not to be tipped, this would at least double servers’ wages. We would have to raise the menu prices to make up for this increase, so would the amount we pay in sales taxes, the percentage of sales we send to the landlord, (and) the whole alphabet soup of FIT, FICA, SIT, SDI, etc.--obviously more money that must come out of the patron’s pocket. It eventually dawned on me that we would be putting another nail in the coffin of this great system of free enterprise which we call the United States of America. Waiters and waitresses are roughly 65% self-employed. They get minimum wage from the employer, (but) the bulk of their income is derived from their own ability to please the customer. They, for all intents and purposes, are salespeople working on a percentage. It is one of the world’s last great remaining incentive systems.”

Greene concluded with five rules regarding tipping that he thinks the dining public should follow. Since I know that tipping is a matter of some concern and controversy to much of that public, and because I think that the rules are good ones, I will reproduce his recommendations here next week.

GRAZING: Noted food writer Nancy Jenkins has left her New York Times post to become the new editor of the Journal of Gastronomy, the handsome, erratic quarterly published by the American Institute of Wine & Food. And Robert Clark, whose English-based European Wine & Food newsletter was praised recently elsewhere in these pages, has given up the venture (it might or might not continue without him) to move stateside as editor of the institute’s newsletter--which will be expanded from eight times a year to 12 under his directorship. . . . And Corporate Travel magazine recently computed the amount of money spent daily for three meals by the average business traveler in various U.S. cities in 1985. The clear winner was New York, where three squares cost Joe Salesman or Jane Exec a cool $92.72 per diem. L.A. was way down at $57.64. San Francisco called in at $64.75--just above (surprise!) Santa Barbara, at $61.15.

OOPS: July 6 just wasn’t my day. In my column on that particular Sunday, I mentioned that Lee Bouvier’s Saloon was about to open on the site of the old Saloon in Beverly Hills. In fact, says the restaurant’s P.R. representative, the opening is scheduled for next month. . . . And a few lines down in the same column I referred to La Maison du Caviar in Paris as being situated on the Place de la Madeleine. Jean-Paul Vignon, director of L.A.’s Caviar & Fine Foods Inc., has written to remind me that it is a competitor, Caviar Kaspia, which finds itself on that Place. La Maison du Caviar, which just opened a branch in Beverly Hills, is in fact located at 21 rue Quentin-Bauchart.

MEALS AND DEALS: Lawry’s California Center, near downtown, makes things easy for businessmen and women and others on a tight schedule with a “Lightning Lunch” weekdays from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Meals may be pre-ordered to make things even faster. . . . Bistango on La Cienega has announced that it plans to launch a 9,000-square-foot offshoot in the Atrium complex in Irvine in February. . . . Catalina Seafood (a restaurant despite its fishmongery name) is new in Hollywood. . . . Trumps remains open as usual during its rather daunting-looking remodeling and expansion. . . . The L.A. branch of Flying Foods, the New York-based specialty fish and produce wholesaler/retailer, has been bought out by one of the original partners, Paul Moriates, and is now doing business in the same Santa Monica location as Special Foods International.

THE MELTING POT: The cooking team of Johnny Mori and the Rev. Mas Kodani with their “Kinnara Taiko Chili” and Ben Tagami with his 100th Battalion “Go for Broke” Chili will be among the contestants at the first annual Asian-American Chili Cook-Off, next Saturday outside the Japan-America Theater in Little Tokyo. The event, which begins at 5:30 p.m., precedes a screening of two “critically acclaimed dramatic films about the contemporary Asian-American experience”--to wit, “Freckled Rice” and “Beacon Hill Boys.” Tickets for the Cook-Off ($10 for adults and $5 for children) and to the screening ($5 for young and old) are now on sale at the theater box office. . . . Warren Winiarski, wine-maker at the near-legendary Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, comes to town that same weekend for two events--an $80-per-person dinner on Saturday, starting at 6 p.m., at St. Estephe in Manhattan Beach, and a $70 affair on Sunday, beginning at 6:30 p.m., at Monique in South Laguna. . . . Noted local pastry chef (and chef chef) Michel Richard reports that he plans to open a full-scale restaurant in late October to be called Citrus on the corner of Melrose and Citrus in West Hollywood.

And as if that weren’t enough, next Sunday is also the date of the third annual Basil Festival and Pesto Invitational, held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Rosebrock’s Vegetable Garden Center in Malibu. The festival, which will offer tastings of basil-based dishes from Il Fornaio, Celestino and Chianti, among other places, is open to the public and free of charge. . . . Meanwhile the Seagull, new on the Redondo Pier in Redondo Beach, is offering a 10% discount to all senior citizens at all hours.