Amanda Cohen doesn't carrot all if you want to tip.

Her lauded vegetarian restaurant is set to open its doors Tuesday in its new larger Lower East Side location at 86 Allen St., and is mandating a 20% administrative fee with every check rather than customary tipping.

The move is designed to provide all restaurant staff, both the servers and those in the kitchen, with a fair wage, Cohen says.

"New York is losing cooks to cities that have a better standard of living," Cohen says. "I can't be part of a system that pays people $12 an hour."

Rather than a service charge, which could only be shared among waitstaff, Cohen is charging an administrative fee that goes to funding the entire restaurant. Everyone who starts to work at the restaurant, from dishwashers to cooks, earn $15, with more depending on seniority. Depending on how the restaurant fares, she'll also award bonuses.

Reservations to get into the smaller, 18-seat Dirty Candy were difficult to come by, often booking two months out. The new 60-seat space is also expected to be a hard table to land. Each stage of the opening and dish development has been cataloged in blogs by the city's culinary obsessives.

New dishes include Brussels Sprouts Tacos with smoked avocado ($30), pickled red onion and salsa verde, and an onion chocolate tarte with smoked almond ice cream ($13).

The push to eliminate tipping has gained steam with notable restaurants, including Thomas Keller's Per Se, Alice Water's Chez Panisse in Berkeley and Grant Achatz's Alinea banning the practice (although Per Se has a line on the check where you can leave extra gratuity above a 20% service charge).

Cohen wanted to build the cost into the menu prices, but worried that customers would have sticker shock. Her goal, once people know the mission - which is currently printed on the bottom of the menu - to have the cost be all inclusive.

Nina Zagat, half of the husband-and-wife team behind the Zagat Guide, says that she thinks customers will accept the change. In a national survey conducted by Zagat at the end of 2013, 72% of respondents said they would like or be ambivalent towards a no tipping policy even if it meant higher menu prices or an administrative fee.

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Dirt Candy to reopen, but no tipping allowed

By Joe Yonan Food and Dining Editor February 2 at 7:00 AM

Heres the rap on wraps (sorry): At some point they became so ubiquitous and theyre often so boring that they turned into the poster child for bad sandwiches everywhere. For those of us who strongly prefer corn tortillas over the flour ones often used in wraps, it was especially grating to see their growth, and all too easy to condemn them.

But they dont have to be all that bad. One of the reasons they became common, in fact, is their upside: a functional design, especially for brown-bagging. And when you fill them wisely, they can be as satisfying to eat as they are to tote.

One key is to make sure theres enough moisture in there. The wrapper a flour tortilla, lavash bread or generic roll-up is super-sturdy, which is what makes them good for transport and what also often makes them dry. You can be generous with condiments, or you can make sure the bulk of your filling includes enough wet ingredients. In the case of a wrap recipe that caught my eye recently, it was the latter, and the ingredient that I think made all the difference was avocado.

In her charming book But I Could Never Go Vegan! (The Experiment, 2014), Kristy Turners take on a wrap combines mashed avocado with mashed white beans in a mixture made tart and a little spicy by the addition of vinegar and canned green chilies, respectively. When it gets spread on lavash, topped with tomatoes and baby spinach leaves and rolled up, the result is something thats more than just functional enough to take to work. If youve dipped into the filling while making it, you might not be able to wait until you get to work before you open up that bag and take a bite.

Link:
Weeknight Vegetarian: And thats a wrap, with avocado and white beans

The owner of a popular Canberra vegetarian restaurant was morally opposed to wiping out a cockroach infestation because it would have involved "killing little insects".

Kingsland Vegetarian Restaurant was fined A$16,000 ($17,000) on Thursday for eight food safety breaches.

ACT Health inspectors discovered the live and dead cockroaches in the kitchen of the eatery in April 2013.

The threat to public health through contaminated food meant the inspectors shut the "unhygienic" restaurant the next day.

But on Thursday the ACT Magistrates Court was told thatthe restaurant, which is still trading, has since fixed the problems and won awards for its vegetarian and vegan fare.

Kingsland Vegetarian Restaurant owner Khanh Hoang was originally charged with 12 breaches of the Food Act.

He pleaded guilty to eight offences and appeared for sentence in the ACT Magistrates Court last Thursday.

Court documents said the eatery - which specialises in vegetarian cuisine - had been granted an operation certificate in December 2012.

Inspectors raided the restaurant four months later after a public tip-off to discover the breaches, which included a cockroach infestation, incorrect food storage, a dirty kitchen and equipment and obstructed and faulty handwashing facilities.

Court documents included pictures that show a number of live and dead cockroaches around the kitchen, including close to cooking equipment.

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Vegetarian restaurateur refused to kill cockroaches