The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors and local governments around the country have taken up demands for raising the minimum wage. California will up the state minimum wage to $10 an hour in January, but Peter Lowell’s restaurant in Sebastopol isn’t waiting.

Last month, the restaurant instituted a 20 percent service charge and eliminated tipping for servers. They also raised prices 10 percent. Now, says owner Lowell Sheldon, the restaurant can offer servers and kitchen staff a living wage and health benefits. Dishwashers now earn $16 an hour. Cooks make between $17 and $20 an hour, and servers, between $22 and $28.

The move is a first in Sonoma County, and part of a growing Bay Area movement.

Sheldon and his partner, Natalie Goble, have been thinking about the change for several years and were influenced by the examples of the Boonville Hotel and Oakland’s Homestead restaurant. The Boonville Hotel’s restaurant has a 15 percent tip added on to all checks, while Homestead raised prices 20 percent and eliminated tipping.

Sheldon and Goble’s reasons for the new policy are varied. Sheldon says he wanted to figure out how to pay his kitchen staff a better wage. Cooks are generally paid less than servers and often don’t stick around very long, especially now with low unemployment.

Sheldon says the move was also a philosophical one.

“What kind of atmosphere are we trying to create?” he asks. “I want an atmosphere that fosters our principles.”

Peter Lowell’s restaurant has made its name with hyperlocal wines and produce sourced from west Sonoma County organic farms and backyard gleaning. In a sense, the new policy brings its wage structure in line with its sustainability-minded menu. Sheldon says the change is the centerpiece of an effort to rethink how the restaurant treats its staff and engages its customers and the larger community.

“Part of what we see our customers wanting is innovation across the board: the daily changing menu, vibrant wine list composed of naturally made wine, our own produce farm,” Sheldon says. “It’s kind of a way of life for us. The spirit of growth and change keeps our customers interested and invigorated.

“It’s with this spirit that we are implementing the change to the way our staff is compensated,” Sheldon continues. “It gives our servers an opportunity to engage in a conversation with our customers about the way things have always been and a way they can be improved.”

Peter Lowell’s customers were already tipping an average of
14 percent at lunch and 21 percent at dinner, so the service charge should not come as a shock. But since tipping also lets diners communicate their experience, the new system might make them feel as though they have less power.

For Goble, tipping was an imperfect system. A good tip might reflect good service and good food, but the benefits and message flowed only to the server. A bad tip means a waiter takes home less money, but the problem that may have caused a customer’s dissatisfaction (slow service, poor food, a long wait) doesn’t get addressed because it isn’t communicated to management.

Sheldon and Goble hope the new policy will facilitate better communication with diners. Sheldon now gives customers his email in hopes they will give him direct feedback.

Under the new policy, regulars who tip big won’t get more attention than anyone else. Ideally, all customers will get the same level of service since there will be no more big tippers—or any tippers.

Goble says the new policy will require that the staff earns that 20 percent charge. “It challenges our staff to perform at the level,” she says.

It’s a bold move and an interesting experiment into economics and psychology. Will customers embrace the idea? Will servers adjust to life without tips? Will turnover in the kitchen be reduced?

So far the response has been overwhelmingly positive, say Goble and Sheldon.

That’s been the experience at Farmstead. The restaurant launched its no-tipping policy in March, and it’s been a success, says owner Fred Sassen. The change was sparked by Oakland’s move to raise the minimum wage to $12.25 earlier this year.

“This allows everyone to be compensated fairly and equally,” Sassen says. “As a cook, you could never come close to making what a server makes. You were stuck in a career without a forward path.” Now all employees have “access to the opportunity to make the same.”

Oakland and San Francisco are leaders in this movement, and other cities have their eyes on them, Sassen says. Now that Peter Lowell’s has jumped in, there will be attention on them as well.

“For us, it’s not good enough to be successful from a business standpoint,” Sheldon says. “We need to be part of a culture that challenges the norms and, at times, breaks through to new places in our society.”

FLAMING LIST

Two notable real estate casualties of the dread 2015 Valley Fire that are haunting the hell out of us:

Hoberg’s Resort, Cobb Mountain. This 53-acre mountain redoubt went up in flames on Saturday. The Hoberg was perhaps most famous for having once been owned by Beatles’ guru the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. A sad press release from the new owners released early in the week—they’ve been on site only since 2014 and were renovating the resort at the time of the fire—is dominated by words like “devastated.”

Harbin Hot Springs. We saw the photos of this legendary retreat, and they were bad. Real bad. The San Francisco Chronicle sent up a reporter to check out the scorched grounds, and the reporter sent back poetry: “The previously pristine spring-fed pools were a sludgy black and littered with fallen, charred tree limbs, melted roof tops and broken tiles. The water remained lukewarm from the natural hot springs nearby. Dead fish floated upside down in the koi ponds on the once terraced hillside while several blackened stone Buddha statues gazed peacefully across the scorched landscape.”

POT BILL NOT GREAT

The Medical Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act of 2015 was hashed out of three different medical-cannabis bills before the California Legislature this session; late last week a final bill emerged that’s expected to get the Jerry Brown signature.

While a generalized sense of relief settles over the medical cannabis community, the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) opposes the emergent bill. The DPA generally supports decriminalization efforts and has been a great go-to resource for proponents of sane drug policies both here and nationally. The state has struggled to get its medical-cannabis house in order since passing the landmark 1996 bill that provided access to patients in need, and this was seen as the year that it finally would. A statewide medical-cannabis regime is widely considered a necessary prerequisite for any full-on legalization push, and that’s expected to unfold via a 2016 referendum.

“We’re not as happy as you might think,” says Lynne Lyman, the San Francisco–based California state director of the DPA. The act would exclude individuals with cannabis-related felony offenses from participating in the new, legalized cannabis economy by denying them the licenses everyone now needs to get. Lyman adds that the economic impact of this move will be felt disproportionately among members of minority communities who want to get in on the legal-weed action. Blacks, whites and Latinos use drugs at roughly the same rates, but blacks and Latinos are far more likely than white to wind up locked up over it.

The felony-charge language? That’s been a dogged demand from the Man, and you can sniff the hard-ass section of the bill in question right back to input from the California Police Chiefs Association, which had yielded a steady and heavy hand of law enforcement on recent efforts to cue up a statewide medical cannabis bill.

And the League of California Cities appeared to get its pay-off, too. Thanks to that lobbying group’s efforts on behalf of localities, whatever the state medical cannabis law says, localities will still be able to limit patient access by prohibiting cultivation and dispensaries in their midst. Patients in declared no-cannabis towns and counties would have to drive elsewhere to get their legal cannabis, and Lyman says that’s a bad move, especially for disabled patients who might not have the means to access their medicine.