Mentioned this in another comment but one thing to consider is patronage at a restaurant is very spiky. Busy shifts and slow shifts. Paying all servers say 50-1

Mentioned this in another comment but one thing to consider is patronage at a restaurant is very spiky. Busy shifts and slow shifts. Paying all servers say 50-100/hr and raising menu prices to match would be prohibitive as the quiet shifts would kill them. Not requiring tipping but any model that allows pay to scale to volume would account for this. We see something similar where I live, restaurants are adding a %age based fee to go direct to kitchen staff. In my state tips can’t be split with BOH staff. This allows the owner to pay the BOH stadf more but scale it to actual volume