Tipping out the kitchen?

Posted by sailordave, June 29, 2009 at 7:04 PM

I'm wondering what you industry and other folks out there think about servers tipping out the kitchen. Where I work now as a linecook the kitchen gets a tiny amout of the servers tips. (Really almost nothing, like $30 a month)
I've also worked at places where it wasn't unusual for me to walk with $50 at the end of a shift on the line.

I know that in some states, such as CA, it's illeagal to make the servers tip out the kitchen. But I can't help but feeling that a kitchen deserves it. Yes, cooks make a higher wage than servers, but it's often the case that a server will make more in a shift than a cook. A cook works just as hard, if not harder, during a rush and yet, if the kitchen isn't being tipped out, he sees nothing for the extra blood, sweat and stress.

Now, you could turn that argument around and say that cooks get paid the same whether the restaurant is empty or not while servers only make signifigant $$ if the place is busy. To that I'll say that, current enonomic climate asisde) most restaurants can at least ball-park estimate how busy they'll be on a given night and staff the FOH accordingly.

What do y'all think? Do cooks deserve tips or should we be happy with our higher wage and the fact that we don't have to deal with the throbbing hordes?

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