Eliminating Tips?

Union Square Hospitality Group

"Danny Meyer, the man whose name is synonymous with the Union Square Hospitality Group, has been a trailblazer from day one: The 57-year-old St. Louis native was an early champion of the casualization of fine dining at Union Square Cafe in the 1980s. In the 1990s, he popularized the split-format restaurant with Gramercy Tavern’s two-in-one: à la carte in the front, set-menu in the back. He completely overhauled the stuffy status quo of museum dining in 2005 with The Modern, inside the Museum of Modern Art... 

It might seem surprising that Meyer is the guy to be doing away with tipping — more than any of those things, he’s best known for his dedication to hospitality above all else, and tipping is a practice that many see as an essential part of that equation. But this isn’t the first time Union Square Hospitality Group has taken a major business cue from social trends, introducing sweeping policies years in advance of everyone else realizing that it’s the right move, even in cases when it’s an imposition to the clientele: Meyer banned smoking at Union Square Cafe over a decade before the city put its restaurant-smoking ban into law. So if Meyer thinks we’d all be better off without tipping, he’s probably got a good reason for it."

Read the full article on New York Eater here