Running a restaurant business is hard, especially in 2025. With the cost of goods and labor on the rise, sales down, and a recession looming, many operators across the country are pressed to find ways to not only keep the doors open, but to profit. And tipping structure is a big part of the equation.
Tipping structures vary from establishment to establishment. While some places pool tips for the front-of-house, others employ a more common model in which all staff members keep the individual tips they receive (except for tipping out a busser). While others have attempted to eliminate tipping altogether in favor of higher wages (but have arguably been unsuccessful).
We’ll explore different approaches to tipping with a series of interviews with operators on why their particular model works for their business. For this installment, Full Book spoke with Paul C. Reilly, culinary director and proprietor of Coperta in Denver, on why he’s opted for a service charge model with a full-house tip pool.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
What led you to adopt the service charge structure?
At Coperta, we have a 23 percent service charge that is automatically added to any bill for dine-in, and a 15 percent service charge for any to-go order. The 23 percent breaks down to: 9 ½ percent to the front-of-house; 4 ½ percent for the back-of-house; 1 percent to managers; and 8 percent to the house, which allows us to pay higher hourly wages, as well as future wage increases within Denver county, plus 10 days paid time off for every single employee. This service charge is on top of employees’ hourly wages, and it's divided by the amount of hours they’ve worked in a shift.
In early 2020, even before the pandemic started, we added a 3 percent back-of-house charge on every single bill in an attempt to close the wage gap. When we came out of lockdown and reopened in June 2020, we thought the time was right for some change. We kicked around the service charge model and thought it might work for us. We came up with 23 percent because we looked back on the average guest-given gratuities, which were between 20–21 percent, and we decided to keep the existing 3 percent, thus coming up with 23.
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