How a renowned Bay Area restaurant got caught in a firestorm over service charges
An exterior view of Burdell is in Oakland, which was flooded with negative reviews after a viral Reddit post criticized its service charge. (Stephen Lam/S.F. Chronicle)
As Geoff Davis was coming up as a chef in San Francisco restaurants in the 2000s, he earned just over minimum wage while watching service staff make well over six figures in salary and tips. When he opened his own restaurant, Oakland's acclaimed Burdell - the No. 1 restaurant on the Chronicle's Top 100 list - he vowed to replace the traditional tipping model with one he found more equitable: a 20% service charge that would go to all employees.
A firestorm about the charge over the past 10 days, which started with an angry Reddit post by a Burdell diner, culminated in violent threats against Davis and his staff after a story about the policy in the California Post called it an "automatic 20% tip because of the country's ‘racist' past" in a headline.
"We got crazy voicemails, stuff I couldn't believe someone would say to a stranger," said Davis, who is Black, referring to the response from the Post article. He posted screenshots on Instagram of some of the racist attacks he said he received, such as a profanity-laced email that called the service charge a "20% racism fee."
Davis said that he had lost many nights of sleep since the diner's complaint was posted on Reddit, but following the publication of the Post's story on Tuesday, which was a followup on an article in SFGATE, Davis became worried about his safety and that of his staff. The California Post article "made it sound like we're combating racism with our service charge," he said. "We think it's a professional and equitable way to pay our team of professionals."
Service charges have long been a point of controversy, but anger over them and tipping culture generally has heated up in recent years amid other inflationary costs. Complaints about them prompting hundreds of responses are a semi-regular occurrence across Reddit.
While Bay Area fine dining institutions like Chez Panisse and the French Laundry were early adopters of the tipless model, the rise of service charges in recent years is largely rooted in the no-tipping movement that began in the mid-2010s. It largely failed in other parts of the country - the result of sticker shock from consumers, pushback from servers who earned more with tips and the economic catastrophe of the pandemic. Here, a wave of restaurants, including San Francisco's famed Zuni Café, seized the moment of reopening their dining rooms after pandemic lockdowns to introduce a service charge. With surging inflation, however, the cost of dining out soared, and many consumers became fatigued by fees. In 2024, when restaurants received a last-minute exemption from a California law that banned so-called junk fees - restaurateurs argued it would cripple their businesses - diner frustration reached new heights.
Because things have gotten so expensive, "the core issue really is that people have a lot less buying power than they did," Davis said. "I think there's anger that's misplaced."
Geoff Davis, chef-owner of Burdell, left, and chef de cuisine Brandon Cavazos work in the kitchen before dinner service. (Stephen Lam/S.F. Chronicle)
Burdell has had a service charge since it started in 2022 as a popup serving soul food interpreted through a California fine dining lens. It funds 40% of the payroll for hourly employees, allowing the restaurant to provide a stable rate for each position, regardless of how busy the restaurant is, Davis said, along with health care and raises. Until this month, the restaurant received "zero complaints" about the charge from customers, Davis said, though complaints about the policy can be found on social media going back at least two years.
The current controversy began on Feb. 3, when a Reddit user posted a photo of a receipt from a recent dinner at Burdell to an anti-tipping Reddit forum with more than 130,000 subscribers with the headline, "What the f is this." The user claimed that they didn't learn about the restaurant's service charge until getting the bill. The post prompted more than 1,500 comments, ranging from people sharing in the outrage to defenses of the restaurant - the top comment currently notes that the charge is "noted very prominently on the menu." (It is also explained on Burdell's website.)
Davis was busy cooking at a charity event in New York when he noticed negative comments showing up on the restaurant's Instagram page, then what felt like a flood of negative reviews on Yelp and Google, as well as emails and calls to the restaurant. "People were sending us horrible stuff," he said.
As the post spread across Reddit and the wider internet, much of the discussion focused on Burdell's explanation of the charge on the receipt, which alludes to the idea that tipping has a racist history and has been consistent since Burdell's popup days. "Tipping in the US has an ugly past, allowing the continuation of underpaid labor," it states. "Included on your check is a 20% Service Charge which we use to provide healthcare and pay hourly staff a consistent, livable wage that is not dependent on chance or archaic customs. No additional tip necessary."
Burdell has used an automatic 20% service charge since its popup days. (Stephen Lam/S.F. Chronicle)
The Reddit user's complaint wasn't necessarily racist, Davis said, but some of the responses to it seemed to pose the question, he said, of, "Who is allowed to do this kind of charge and question how things work in America?"
"There (are) so many restaurants that do this," Davis said. "This is a scary thing and it feels unfair. That's the thing that has kept me up."
Burdell has faced versions of that question - what is it allowed to do? - since its inception. Diners have complained about Davis' takes on Southern and soul food, for example. In 2023, Davis responded to one such complaint by saying that the cuisine should not be so narrowly defined. "Soul food means so much more to me than what it's been in the past," he wrote on Instagram. "Our food shouldn't be confined to lunch counters, fried chicken, steam tables."
Ascending to national renown - it was named Food & Wine's 2024 best restaurant in America, among other accolades - has only brought more scrutiny. "No restaurant has prompted more dissenting emails than Burdell," Chronicle restaurant critic MacKenzie Chung Fegan wrote last year. "This is partly because once anything is declared ‘the best,' the gauntlet is thrown."
On Reddit threads, people have questioned the restaurant's standing as a top U.S. restaurant, which Davis said did not surprise him. "People claim that it's affirmative action, we'd paid for it and there's no way a Black restaurant can be the best," he said.
After the Feb. 3 Reddit post about the service charge, Davis spent the next two days, including a redeye flight home to Oakland, responding to the comments and writing an impassioned defense of the restaurant's service policy, discussing tipping's origins in the United States after slavery ended. Things seemed to quiet down.
Dungeness crab gumbo at Burdell. One of the country's most acclaimed restaurants, it has also faced criticism for its service charge. (Stephen Lam/S.F. Chronicle)
Then, on Feb. 6, SFGATE wrote about the Reddit controversy. Days later, the California Post picked up the story and portrayed it as an expression of "woke" West Coast culture - part of the editorial mandate of the new Rupert Murdoch-owned conservative tabloid - cutting and pasting quotes out of context, Davis said, without reaching out to him. (SFGATE and the Chronicle are both owned by Hearst but the newsrooms are run independently.)
The complaints about the service charge not only resurged, but escalated with the wider exposure and turned "hostile and hateful," said Davis, who posted screenshots of racist emails the restaurant received.
Davis felt compelled to speak out again. "We're tired of this constant hate tons of people seem to think we deserve when all we are doing is run (ning) a food business and do (ing) our best to take care of our staff," he wrote on Instagram, calling out the Post article's headline for being misleading.
Later that day, the headline was rewritten: "20% tip" was replaced with "20% charge." Davis also posted a screenshot of what appeared to be an email from the article's author, in which she apologized to him and his staff. (The reporter did not respond to requests to comment.)
The attacks, whether in emails or direct Instagram messages, were still ongoing as of Friday but had diminished, Davis said. In the meantime, he added, locals have supported the restaurant by making reservations, often including notes about how much they support its mission. Burdell is fully booked for Valentine's Day.
Davis believes that a service charge is "the only way for restaurants to survive," with the growing cost of doing business and the industry's famously narrow margins.
And, he added, "We're trying to treat our really diverse team of people who are really skilled with dignity and care."
