By Marco Shalma

New York wants to clean up restaurant surcharges. Restaurants want the city to stay out of their kitchens. Customers want to stop playing “Guess the Fee” every time the check lands. Everyone claims to be protecting someone. The question is whether anyone’s actually telling the truth. 

The city’s new proposal tries to clarify what counts as a legitimate, “bona fide” service charge. No more random fees buried at the bottom of a menu. No catch-all add-ons disguised as “operations.” If it’s a charge, it has to be directly tied to a service the customer chose and clearly disclosed before food is ordered. In theory, that sounds like transparency. In practice, it’s the city tightening its grip on an industry that’s been improvising its way through post-pandemic economics. 

But here’s the part restaurants don’t love talking about: some operators used the chaos of the last few years as a blanket permission slip. What started as a temporary survival fee quietly morphed, in many places, into a permanent revenue booster. Plenty of great restaurants handled it responsibly. Plenty of others exploited it. Cisco-forward menus charging boutique-restaurant prices. Surcharges that cover everything and mean nothing. Guests paying more for the same mediocre plate.

So now the city is stepping in. And while no one in a dining room wants more regulation, it’s hard to pretend the industry didn’t help create the problem. Survival tactics can turn into habits. Habits can turn into loopholes. Loopholes can turn into business models.

The proposal also allows restaurants to add a mandatory gratuity if there’s a formal written agreement with employees — but it has to be disclosed up front, and every dollar must go to the workers. That part is aimed at fairness. It also raises the question: how many small restaurants can even meet that threshold? And if they can’t, what’s their alternative? 

Customers aren’t innocent here either. Everyone says they want small businesses to survive, but the second the menu goes up two dollars, the comments fly. New Yorkers want ethics, value, transparency, and convenience, all at once — and at pre-2019 prices.

So what are we actually regulating? Greed? Survival? Confusion?

Is the city overreaching? Yes. Did restaurants invite this by stretching the boundaries? Also yes. Are customers paying the price of this tug-of-war? Always.

The real question hanging over all of this is simple: What does a fair restaurant bill look like in a city where no one trusts each other anymore?

Because until someone answers that, we’re going to keep rewriting rules, redesigning menus, and arguing over fees that shouldn’t exist in the first place.