Dallas Now Has Its First No-Tipping Restaurant

Around the country, trendy restaurateurs like Tom Colicchio and Danny Meyer have led a charge to ban tipping in their restaurants. That trend kicked off a few years ago, and now Dallas is finally joining the party.

Canary By Gorji, open for more than a decade in Addison, will eliminate tipping early next week. The reasoning behind the move is two-fold — to make division of wages more equitable between front-of-house employees and those in the kitchen, and improving the restaurant’s ability to provide top-notch service to its guests.

“To take tipping off the menu was not an easy decision,” says chef-owner Mansour Gorji. “Wait staff give each and every guest the level of service they deserve, no matter how much they might be spending. What a customer spends should not have any bearing on what a server makes.”

To offset the cost of raising wages, Gorji will raise prices in his restaurant by 18% to 20%, figures that correlate to average (read: decent) tipping. “ “Many waiters today are trained to upsell as a tip incentive,” says Gorji. “To me, a dining experience should be void of this hoopla and that’s why we don’t rush you out the door to seat someone else in your place.”

Canary By Gorji’s no-tipping policy will go into effect next Tuesday. How it will impact the restaurant’s revenues remains to be seen.