What is our Admin Fee and Why?

In the state of Massachusetts, tipping back of house (kitchen) employees is illegal. This law contributes to huge wage disparities between kitchen and front of house (service staff) employees. Additionally, the tipping model is generally outdated, and puts the income of employees in the hands of consumers–a concept that doesn’t exist in any other industry. 5 years ago, in order to circumvent this system, we implemented a 20% admin fee and a 3% benefit fee in lieu of traditional gratuity, essentially replacing the tipping model. By including these fees as tax items on your bill, we are able to share gratuities across the whole house, guaranteeing all our employees make a living wage, regardless of what role they work. While all businesses factor the cost of paying their employees into the consumers’ costs, we’ve felt proud to offer transparency in the delineation between fair food prices, and the price of paying our workers. We work extremely hard to keep our pricing fair and approachable and our customer service fun, honest, and transparent. By adding these fees, our team benefits from a true shared house model that supports teamwork and camaraderie...and health and retirement benefits!

We’re often asked, why not just raise our prices? Simply put: raising our prices instead of using these fees would not only widen the wage gap (and cost our guests more), it would also defeat the purpose of why we do this in the first place.

What is the “Junk Fee” Law and Why does our menu look so different now?

As of September 2nd, Massachusetts has implemented a new law that makes our model a little more challenging. This new law targets “junk fees,” and aims to protect consumers from hidden fees. While this is good news, overall, it does target our admin & benefits fees, which are not junk and have never been hidden. In order to be compliant with the current guidance, each item on our menu must reflect the total price including these fees. As such, our prices now include ALL taxes: our admin & benefits fees, plus state & local taxes. This will seem like we have raised our prices–we have not! The price of each item now simply reflects the inclusion of these taxes and fees. We don’t love this–we have never tried to hide our admin & benefits fees, and are proud to include them. To us, factoring them into the price of each item feels more like hiding them and less like transparency, but we must comply with this new law or else give up this model entirely, which we refuse to do. We remain dedicated to providing for our guests and our team!

We greatly appreciate all of your support over the years, and can’t thank you enough for sticking by us as we continue to roll with the punches in this ever-changing industry.

To get more involved in supporting us and our team, or if we can help you implement a similar model, please email Rebecca.Kean@gmail.com. As the former GM, and current COO/CFO, her passion lies behind the creative scene and centers on the “business end” of changing this industry to better support its staff, ownership, and guests alike!