You sit down at a nice steakhouse — say, Superprime — and order a meal that rings up at $80. Sounds reasonable for a splurge, right? Now add the 7% "San Francisco employee fee" ($5.60), the 8.625% sales tax ($6.90), and — because you're not a monster — a 20% tip ($16). Your $80 dinner just became $108.50. That's a 35% markup before you've even thought about parking or cocktails.

Seven percent. That's not a typo. And it might be the highest surcharge currently slapped onto a restaurant check in the city, though the competition is stiff. Most SF diners have grudgingly accepted the 3-5% surcharges that became standard after the city mandated employer health spending requirements. But 7% feels like a threshold — the point where a line item stops being a footnote and starts feeling like a second tax.

Here's what frustrates us: these fees exist because San Francisco's regulatory costs for operating a restaurant are genuinely brutal. Between the health care security ordinance, paid parental leave mandates, and one of the highest minimum wages in the country, restaurant owners face a cost structure that would make operators in most American cities faint. Rather than raise menu prices transparently, many restaurants tack on surcharges — a practice that California lawmakers, notably including state Sen. Scott Wiener, have declined to ban despite growing consumer frustration.

As one local put it bluntly: "Oh gurl, I ain't leaving a 20% tip if there's a 7% employee fee." Another SF resident admitted they simply subtract surcharges from the tip — petty, maybe, but hard to blame them.

And that's the real tragedy here. The people these mandates are supposed to help — restaurant workers — end up catching the backlash when diners trim their tips to offset fees they didn't expect. The city creates the mandate, the restaurant passes the cost through a surcharge, and the server gets stiffed. Everyone loses except the bureaucrats who designed the policy.

We're not saying restaurants shouldn't cover employee benefits. We're saying the honest move is to price your menu accordingly and skip the surprise fees. And maybe — just maybe — City Hall should consider whether piling mandate after mandate onto small businesses is actually helping workers, or just generating resentment one receipt at a time.