“What kind of restaurant is Juliet?” This is a question I get a lot. A simple answer could be, a relaxed french bistro open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But the part of Juliet that matters most to me has nothing to do with the food we serve, and has everything to do with who makes and serves the food to you, and how they are paid.
Juliet is the first restaurant in Boston where none of the workers depend on tips to constitute their minimum wage.
Tips are not wages, and shouldn’t be treated as such. Tips are optional; wages are not. The amount of a tip can be influenced by factors that have nothing to do with the recipient’s job performance— imagine losing your income because of the actions of your colleague. This is what happens when food takes too long, or a guest doesn’t like their food, and the customer decides to leave a smaller tip because of it.
The hospitality industry, in all but 7 states in the US, is the only industry that allows employers to pay its service employees less than the minimum wage and expect the customer to directly pay the employee the difference. This creates a two-tiered wage system within the restaurant. Back of House workers, cooks, and dishwashers are paid a guaranteed wage for hours worked, so they receive the same pay for a shift on a busy Saturday dinner as they do for a slow Monday lunch. In contrast, the Front of House workers, servers, bussers, and bartenders are paid largely by the customers of the restaurant through tips, meaning their take-home pay fluctuates by the day, week, and season. This practice is codified through a provision called the tip-credit, or tipped-minimum wage, which earned legal standing during the Reconstruction era when the railroad industry wanted to legalize paying $0 wages to newly freed enslaved people.
At face value this rule sounds great to a business owner who gets to pay less money to their workers—but it’s harmful to the people who work in the industry, and has consequences that spill out into society at large. The inequity of the two-tiered wage system is not only harmful to the individual, who may experience wage theft or harassment because their wage can be manipulated by bosses, co-workers, or guests. It’s also bad for:
Service: when an employee is constantly concerned about whether they will make their rent payment that month due to a slower shift, or constantly searching for a new job where tips appear are slightly higher, or where better shifts are available, the employee is not focused on hospitality and generating regulars — the behaviors that mean longer term returns for the business.
Turnover: in a precarious wage environment, there is a higher chance for turnover—which is costly in absolute dollars, as well as from an opportunity cost of the management’s wasted time. If an employee lacks a guaranteed wage from the employer, it’s very hard to cultivate a high degree of loyalty. This means that the allure of the next new restaurant can pull your staff away. The lack of a stable wage signifies to the employee that they are expendable and easily replaced, so why would they feel any allegiance to such an employer?
Productivity: in a traditional restaurant, the servers act like independent contractors more than employees of the restaurant, not necessarily making choices to benefit the longer term health of the business, but rather their short term personal gain. If both sides of the restaurant (Front of House and Back of House) are incentivized and paid radically differently, it is nearly impossible to imagine them being able to cohesively work towards a shared goal.
The Future: If a majority of people in the US have their first job in a restaurant, they are learning a lot about how a workplace functions, what is and isn’t acceptable behavior, and their own worth as a person. In workplaces where the typically female side of the staff is paid in a more precarious way than the mostly male staff, this structure normalizes the gender pay gap.
I believe that as a business owner, the decisions I make about which vendors we use, what products we buy, and how we compensate our employees are not unrelated choices; each is a component of a healthy ecosystem. Juliet operates with a multiple bottom line approach, whereby financial profits are not pursued singularly, but balanced against the benefits or risks to multiple stakeholders including the employees, the community, our farmers, fishermen, and other purveyors, and the environment. By eliminating the two-tiered wage system at Juliet, we hope to create a restaurant that delivers more stable paychecks, creates a better guest experience by cultivating a happy and empowered professional workforce, and aligns incentives between owners and all employees so that a benefit for one is a benefit to all.
Juliet is a test to see what is possible, to see what changes are needed to the “handbook” we inherit so that we can build more resilient restaurants in the future. Juliet has been through many iterations: how we operate, how we navigate tips and service charges, and how we survive a global pandemic. But the guiding principle, and the thing we return to when making decisions large and small is the question of equity. We don’t pretend to have found all the answers, or that what we’ve done has always been easy—but we know that the challenges would be much less if there were more of us working on creating solutions. The experiment is ongoing.
-katrina juliet jazayeri