Geoff Davis doesn’t want his employees to have to rely on tips.
The acclaimed chef who worked in restaurants and cocktail bars across the Bay Area and wine country before opening the Oakland soul food eatery Burdell, named for his grandmother, points out on customers’ receipts that tipping culture in the United States has a racist history — rooted in underpaid service jobs relegated to formerly enslaved Black workers.
Instead of tips, his restaurant adds a 20% service fee to the bill. It takes the guesswork and luck out of the equation, Davis said, and helps to stabilize wages across dining rooms and kitchens — where servers often receive tips but cooks and dishwashers do not — and helps offset the cost of healthcare benefits offered to full-time employees.
The service charge is not an out-of-the-ordinary practice, and is common among some upscale restaurants. And yet, Davis’ restaurant has been the target in recent days of online hate, a surge of vitriol prompted by a now-deleted Reddit post featuring the service charge policy printed at the bottom of Burdell receipts.
“Tipping in the US has an ugly past, allowing the continuation of underpaid labor. We don’t like that history. Included on your check is a 20% Service Charge which we use to pay hourly staff a consistent and livable wage, not dependent on archaic tipping customs or chance. No need to add anything else. Thank you! Burdell <3,” it reads.
Burdell, which was named the best U.S. restaurant by Food & Wine magazine in 2025, was immediately flooded with nasty reviews on platforms such as Yelp, as well as angry, hateful and, at times, threatening emails, phone calls and direct messages on social media.
“I’m just blown away by why we are getting held to a different standard,” Davis said. “We aren’t doing anything crazy. We didn’t invent service charges.”
Davis said when he put the service charge policy in place several years ago, he carefully considered the language to nod to the history of tipping without overloading 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 offer healthcare coverage, which he felt he could accomplish with a mandatory service charge. He noted the physical toll of restaurant work, with staff “working on their feet”’ daily.
Davis said pay for his employees is generally around double the local minimum wage, which hit $17.34 in Oakland on Jan. 1. Full-time employees can get about 75% of their healthcare covered, he said.
The Redditor whose comment prompted the outrage posted to r/EndTipping, a subreddit dedicated to advocating “for a system where workers aren’t reliant on tips.” According to Davis, that’s what the service-charge model is all about.
The poster wrongly claimed the establishment failed to disclose the automatic fee beforehand. The policy is featured prominently on Burdell’s menu, and the receipts do not include a line for additional tips.
Yet the onslaught has continued for weeks, even after Davis addressed the situation in a Feb. 4 post on Instagram. In his post, he said that for years he had worked in restaurants earning below the minimum wage — and watching as so-called front-of-house workers earned significantly more than those working in the kitchen.
In many restaurants, back-of-house workers with lower take-home pay are more likely to be Latino, Black or from other marginalized groups, while server positions are often held by white people. A 2015 study by Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, a nonprofit labor advocacy group found waiters at high-end restaurants could earn salaries five times greater than those of employees washing dishes, clearing tables and prepping food in the same establishment.
“We’ve gotten threats of violence, threats of burning down the restaurant and just horrible, hateful emails about how we’re crooks,” Davis told The Times. “It’s exhausting and scary, not just for me but for our staff.”
Many Americans are unaware that tipping is a legacy of slavery. Although the practice originated in feudal Europe and was brought to the United States by travelers, it blossomed after the Civil War as U.S. employers sought to avoid paying formerly enslaved Black workers. The Pullman Co., which manufactured railroad cars, notoriously hired newly freed Black men as porters, drove down their wages and forced them to rely heavily on tips from white riders. The practice of tipping entrenched a racialized class structure in service jobs throughout the hospitality sector.
Although California has for several decades required restaurants to pay the state’s minimum wage regardless of how much workers receive in tips, federal law continues to allow a subminimum wage for tipped workers.
The federal minimum wage is $7.25, stuck there since 2009; the tipped minimum wage is far lower, at $2.13. Employers of these tipped workers can use customers to subsidize $5.12 of the business’ hourly wage obligation. Although many states have a minimum wage far above the federal $7.25 per hour, many still have an exceptionally low minimum wage for workers who get tips.
The discussion around tips remains contentious, and California lawmakers have struggled with how to handle the imperfect solution of service fees. Restaurants such as Michelin-starred Taiwanese eatery Kato, in downtown L.A., and Coucou, in West Hollywood, charge fees — 18% and 20%, respectively — high enough that diners often don’t feel a need to add a tip. Restaurants that have a smaller 3% charge to cover healthcare might leave customers confused on how to proceed.
Legally, service fees are treated differently from tips: The former is the property of the restaurateur to distribute as they please, while tips are legally the property of the individual server.
Former servers at Jon & Vinny’s, a popular Italian American restaurant with several Southern California locations, filed a class-action lawsuit in 2023 alleging that their company denied servers tips and was eating into their take-home pay because of diner confusion over an 18% service fee. The suit prompted the restaurant to update language on its bill to explain that the service fee was not the same as a gratuity.
In 2024, California considered doing away with service charges as part of legislation banning “hidden” or “junk” fees but walked back the proposal at the eleventh hour.
At the time, Kato’s owner, Ryan Bailey, told The Times that although some operators were “misusing the service charge,” most, he believed, were distributing them fairly to provide benefits and compensate employees “in a way that is so immensely appropriate and responsible and forward thinking that if it was to go away, it would be really crippling to everybody.”
Oakland and several other cities have adopted ordinances requiring funds collected through service charges to be distributed among hospitality employees, not supervisors, and requires restaurants to keep documentation, in case of a city investigation.
Davis said that many online commenters who had called him out seemed to object both to tipping and service charges, even as restaurateurs struggle to raise menu prices to keep pace with the soaring costs of food and rent.
“People want to have autonomy over how much they get to leave [in tips], but our society doesn’t work that way,” Davis said. “The server who served you, if they forgot to fill your water, their rent is still due, and it’s not variable.
“People want tips so they can not tip. But we have to pay for the labor somewhere.”
Davis says that although the stream of vitriol toward himself and Burdell has continued online, the community has rallied around the restaurant.
“People are really coming out and supporting and we’ve been really busy,” Davis said. “It has really restored that faith and will to keep doing the thing.”
Times staff writer Stephanie Breijo contributed to this report.
