The next time you feel good about yourself for plunking down a $20 tip for a $100 tab at a restaurant, consider this: The server who benefits from your generosity may not actually hold on to that princely sum.

Yes, the system of tipping waiters and waitresses for good service is more complicated than the simple transaction would appear. These complications apply for the server, restaurant management and for the IRS, which has to keep track of who is getting paid and how much. (Servers on average fail to report 40 percent of their tips, according to the IRS.)

If you read newspaper food and restaurants blogs, no topic stirs more controversy than tipping, whether it’s the percentage of the check waiters should be tipped or the notion that tipping should be abolished as Old World noblesse oblige.

Tipping points
Cullen Kent, chef and owner of Midtown perennial Café Society, described the tipping system as “a Catch-22. Some diners tip well and some don’t. Some tip on wine and some don’t. Some tip on the amount before taxes and some on the after-tax total.

“Waiters work hard. At Café Society, they polish glasses, polish silverware and set tables. They get paid very little. Tips are their money.”

“Tipping is a very unbalanced system,” said Glenn Hays, owner, with his wife, Martha, for 30 years of the former La Tourelle (now Restaurant Iris) and current owners of Café 1912. “On the other hand, if tipping were abolished, the price of the meal would go up.”

The concept of tipping for service in American restaurants began after the Civil War, when prosperity sent the newly wealthy to Europe. Among the practices they brought home was tipping.
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