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I disagree. Good service is a pleasure to receive, and adds a lot to the value of the experience.

When your water glass never gets quite empty, and the flat bread never quite runs out, and you're not sure how that happened because your conversation was not interrupted, and your food arrives hot and when you look around to get the bill and it arrives just like that. When service is really good the restaurant feels like magic. That's worth a lot.

Even if the service is not part of the experience, bad service can easily ruin it. If you need to wait several minutes before someone gives you a menu, then you need to wait another 5 minutes before you can order and then again you wait another 5-10 minutes before you can pay, that pretty much ruins the experience. This is quite common at casual restaurants here in Germany and annoys me every time, especially in the first weeks after returning from a trip to the US...

There's no way that the fact that someone takes your order and brings your food to you consists of 1/5th of the value of your experience.

Yes there is. I enjoy being waited on and a good waiter makes a big difference to my enjoyment of the meal, plus I know some of that tip is getting kicked back towards the kitchen and cleaning staff. I used to work as a cook and quickly pick up on whether a restaurant is a nice place to work or not.

Have you ever run a restaurant? By what crazy math is staffing only 1% of the cost of running one? (Keeping in mind that tips aren't just going to the your main waiter, they're also distributed among busboys and other customer-interacting staff.)

He didn't say that the waiting staff is 1% of the cost. He said that being waited on is only ~1% of the value the customer is receiving, since the waiting experience is much less important to the consumer than the food quality, convenience, or venue.

> The real value in going out to eat, in roughly decreasing order of importance:

I'll just note that you mean the "real value of going out to eat, in my opinion". Because there's no way I personally would put "food quality" at the top of the list over "atmosphere of being with friends". I'd even put convenience over food quality, otherwise fast food would dry up overnight.

So even if there's a lot of value in having your order taken, food brought to you, water refilled... let's think like entrepreneurs - can this service be provided for less money? If so, then you can charge customers less, giving you an advantage.

Ordering - there could just be a tablet with an app that lets you see the menu, answers all your questions, shows you pictures of the food and nutritional info and stuff, and lets you order when you're ready.

Water refills - just provide each table with a pitcher.

Bringing food to you (and other things like condiments) - One option is to still have servers bring it to you. But it would cost much less because the ordering app lets them be more efficient with their time. Another option is to have the tablet alert you when your food is ready, and you can go get it.

> it doesn't make sense to allocate 15-20% of the payment to something that is only like 1% of the value you're receiving

Not quite true. A good server not only takes your order and brings your food, but they also act as quality assurance on your behalf, which provides a lot more than 1% of the value you are receiving. Furthermore, despite the misinformation in the article, most restaurants do under the table tip pooling among employees.

Seems like you're ranking these by the value to you, rather than the cost of providing them.