Toronto restaurant announces unique stance on tipping but not everyone's on board
Tipping culture has been a hot-button issue in Toronto — and the rest of Canada — for some time now, and one restaurant just announced an approach to tipping that few others have.
When it comes to tipping, restaurants in Toronto typically fall into one of two buckets. First, some encourage standard tipping rates. While technically optional, you'd be flirting with a side of saliva in your meal (or, at the very least, a surly server) should you opt out.
In rarer cases, other restaurants — Barque Smokehouse, Richmond Station and Sarang Kitchen, to name a few — have eschewed tipping altogether, opting instead to bake the costs associated with paying their staff a living wage into their prices.
Nakwon Kisa, a popular Korean buffet in North York, is charting its own course when it comes to tipping, though, taking to Instagram to explain their unusual approach.
Rather than opting to lean hard into tipping culture or all the way out of it, Nakwon Kisa's approach is, interestingly, a little bit of both.
"Tipping will always be your choice — never an expectation," the post reads. "Whether you choose to leave a tip or not, your service will not change."
The restaurant goes on to say, "We believe the people who care for our guests deserve to be respected and fairly rewarded," adding, "That responsibility belongs to us."
Though, in theory, tipping is optional all the time, it's certainly a break from tradition to openly tell customers that whether they want to or not is up to them. Still, for some customers, the approach isn't enough.
One commenter wrote, "no tipping. raise your prices if you have to. I'd rather pay that than tip."
"I am with this guy raise prices instead of tipping," writes another.
Whether Nakwon Kisa's approach to tipping catches on with other restaurants in the city remains to be seen. Only one thing remains clear: Toronto residents are fed up with tipping culture, and restaurants are becoming increasingly forced to find creative ways to thwart it while still rewarding their staff properly.
Nakwon Kisa
