That Reddit Restaurant Surcharge Spreadsheet? This Ticked-Off Diner Helped Inspire It

Service fees aren’t a new phenomenon, and they aren’t going away anytime soon. However, restaurant patrons in Los Angeles have recently noticed their bills have a little extra tacked on than just their meals, ranging anywhere between 5 to 20%.

The explanations listed for the mysterious fee often cite “healthcare” or a “wellness fee” as their reasoning. And since the charge can exclude gratuity, the final cost of a meal can turn a full belly into an upset stomach rather quickly. Certain restaurants allow for the fee to be removed at the diner’s request, so better to always check when the check comes.

Brittany Gorin first noticed the surcharge on her surprisingly exorbitant bill in April. This motivated the Mid-City resident to post about her experiences on Reddit, and from there, the community sprang into action to share their own dining mishaps, ultimately leading to the creation of a spreadsheet that tracks restaurants in L.A. engaging in the practice. The list is at nearly 300 restaurants and is still growing.

Recently, I chatted with Gorin about her experience.

Q: Going out to eat can be something to look forward to, but it can also be something that troubles your bank account. Most people would suffer in silence if they paid too much for a meal — I know I have — but what made you decide to share your experience publicly?

Gorin: I started the post on the Los Angeles subreddit because I think a lot of people have felt unhappy about service fees, which are misleading, showing up on a lot of their bills when they go out to eat at restaurants.

Q: What’s your technical understanding of service fees? Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever noticed if I’ve paid for them and I’ve certainly never given a second thought as to where they were going.

Gorin: My understanding of service fees is that they go directly to the ownership of the restaurant, as opposed to gratuities, which in the state of California, I understand, are legally obligated to go to servers.

So, it's confusing. Because when you see “service fee” on the bottom of the check or on the bottom of the menu, you would think it goes to your server, but I think it's not actually obligated to be the case. For a long time, you saw a lot of 3 and 5% service fees on the bottom of checks.

And more recently, you've seen some restaurants charge as much as 18%, which really does look like it's a gratuity.

The Reddit post by Brittany Gorin that helped launch "the spreadsheet".

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Q: Can you describe the experience you had at a restaurant that inspired the original post? Thanks to this spreadsheet we know they’ve reverted to a 4% service fee since the beginning of August, but your experience was when it was much higher, right?

Gorin: What finally sparked me putting this thread together was [my husband and I] were eating at Petit Trois and had a fabulous meal, with a great server. It was one of the first nice meals we went out to since I had a baby.

And we saw some ambiguous language on the bottom of the menu that implied that the 18% may go to the server. So we thought that was the gratuity. And the server came out at the end of our meal and explicitly told us that that does not go to her, that if we enjoyed her service, and we were going to leave a gratuity, that should be on top of the 18%.

The whole thing just spoiled the meal. It left a really sour taste in our mouths after having such a nice experience, and we obviously tipped on top of the service fee because we didn't want to screw over the server who had done such a nice job. If you were a server could you imagine thinking a customer is tipping when they're actually not giving you an extra cent??

Q: So the "service fee" can be justified by any number of costs incurred when running a restaurant. Have you had any experiences where, once you’d asked about it, you were assured the fee was going back into the restaurant itself?

Gorin: One experience I had was eating at Bestia. Sometimes it says you can remove the service fee, in this instance it did. So I said to the server, “Would you please remove the service fee and I'll tack it on as additional to your gratuity so that it actually goes to you."

In this case, the server actually said to us, “Oh, no, it does actually go to us. I've seen the books. I love working here." So we knew that that extra fee actually gets given to the server. In that case, I was like, “Oh! Fine. Leave it on."

But as we've seen in other experiences, it doesn't always go to the servers. It goes to the owners and then they can distribute it however they see fit.

Q: I’m curious since you originated the post that inspired the spreadsheet, what are your hopes for a community-built opposition to service fees?

Gorin: It seems like such a collective action problem, right? If everyone comes together and says we don't want these misleading service fees, or it becomes a big enough issue that something like the city council takes it up, then we can actually have an effect. Otherwise, without a joint effort, it's just everybody going into restaurants individually and then not even realizing there's a service fee and awkwardly having to deal with it during their meal. But at the very least it can help people know what to expect ahead of time at these restaurants.

In my opinion, it’s a price transparency issue and someone getting paid a decent wage shouldn't be dependent on whether you're having a good day or a bad day. The service fee just adds to that pressure.

It seems like post-pandemic–when restaurants are really struggling–that there's been a lot more of these service fees and at much higher rates, like the 18% I saw a few months ago.

It'd be nice if gratuity, aka the wages of the workers, were also included as a cost of doing business and reflected in the price, and we could do away with service charges and tipping. Imagine knowing exactly what you were paying when you went to a restaurant just by looking at the menu?

LAist reached out to Bestia for comment on their service fee model and received this response: “We do have a small service charge which goes to directly cover our employee’s healthcare. The reason for the additional line item charge instead of us wrapping it into the menu prices is it would cost customers based on how the tax system works in California. Instead of paying 4% they would be paying 5% or 6%. It’s a way for restaurants to work the system by taking less from the customer while giving more to the employee and less to the state.”

Petit Trois has not yet returned our inquiry.

The interview was edited for clarity and length.