On the second business day of their new Mexican eatery, Santa Fe BK in Williamsburg, Melissa Klein and John Watterberg take a seat in the dining room to discuss one of the guiding principles of their new restaurant. The couple describe a recurring experience from their over 20 years in the city’s hospitality industry. At the end of a typically chaotic night of dinner, Klein, who worked as a waitress and hostess, and Watterberg, a bartender, got ready to go, happily counting their stacks of tips and then waving goodbye to the cooks and dishwashers with a slightly guilty “Thank you!”
“As you swipe, they say, ‘Uh-huh. Yeah great Let me swipe for my $ 15 “- or her $ 12 or $ 8 -” an hour, “says Klein. “It’s rough. There is definitely a gap and we’re trying to close that gap. “
In Santa Fe, which has been serving Green Chile breakfast burritos and cheeseburgers since the beginning of October, they hope to have found a solution. The front desk staff earns $ 12 plus tip; Daily takeaway cashiers who are also tipped earn $ 15; and back-of-house workers earn $ 18 plus a so-called rise bonus, a percentage of the restaurant’s sales during their shift (they plan 8 percent and see how it goes). In this way, “the busier you are, the more money you make,” as Klein puts it, whether or not you interact with customers directly.
This last detail is important because New York law allows tips to be pooled only among restaurant staff who look after customers personally and those who are not next to a table or behind a bar reciting specials or refilling drinks. In an effort to level the playing field, certain outfits – such as the Dirt Candy vegetable restaurant and Crown Heights’s Hunky Dory – waived tips and raised salaries. But the movement to forego tips has largely fizzled out in New York, at least for the time being, hampered by skeptical customers and sometimes dissatisfied waiters who make less money on fixed wages.
More recently, some restaurants in the city, such as the much-talked about seafood restaurant Dame, have introduced staff innovations such as training chefs to be waiters, which entitles them to a share of the tip pool when serving tables. And when Danny Meyer of Union Square Hospitality Group announced the end of the tipping ban for its restaurants last year, he hinted at plans for a revenue-sharing model similar to that in Santa Fe and a number of other restaurants around the country.
For Klein and Watterberg, Santa Fe’s profit-sharing strategy was an unexpected consequence of the pandemic. At the end of January 2020, Watterberg, 43, quit his job in the Botanica Bar after 12 years to look after her two children; Klein, 41, started working full-time at Motel Morris after stints at DuMont and the Red Cat and as a parent who stayed at home. Weeks later, restaurants were closed due to COVID. “We had to talk for a long time,” says Klein. “We spent a year planning how to open a restaurant fairly and we didn’t even know if restaurants would open again. It was a kind of speculative exercise. “
That hypothetical conversation extended to wage transparency and what they call “horizontal attitudes,” which means that they are committed to training everyone at every station. Since the pay structure should ensure that everyone earns roughly the same, around $ 200 per shift on a normal night, they hope people will be drawn to their ideal position. “Everyone wants to be a bartender,” says Klein. “Everyone knows that this is where you make the most money – but that’s not necessarily true here. And some days I would rather serve tables than be a bartender. ”One thing they made an early decision was that the money they add to their paychecks doesn’t translate into higher menu prices. “That means that we have to cut our salary,” says Watterberg. “At every point where we asked ourselves, ‘How are we going to pay people so much money?’ Melissa looked at me and said, ‘We’re taking another pay cut.’ And that’s acceptable as long as we can pay our bills as long as our children have a childhood. “
The rent for the restaurant is not outrageously cheap, but you pay less than previous tenants; the landlord “seems happy to have filled the space,” says Watterberg. And they kept their food costs down, they say, with an understanding that their wage bill would be high. The only real extravaganza are the hatch green chillies shipped from New Mexico, where Watterberg spent much of his childhood. The chili is key that goes into the breakfast burritos made from homemade flour tortillas and in the cheeseburgers (both $ 9 each or $ 50 for a bag of six) and, when dinner starts, in dishes like enchiladas and Macaroni and cheese is included. They currently have 3,400 pounds in stock, some of which have just arrived from New Mexico. They estimate they’ll be using three or four tons of the stuff a year.
This symbol of the Southwest, rarely seen outside of its home state, drew a number of New Mexicans to the restaurant on the first day – one of whom even returned the next morning. As for the couple’s salary plan, the response was almost as enthusiastic. As Klein and Watterberg put it, they never expected to be selective, but they had no problem recruiting. “Given the ongoing hiring desert and labor shortage, the constant question is whether it is lazy, legitimate workers or abusive management practices?” Asks Watterberg. “And we have a lot of people on site and even more in the starting blocks.”
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