Rumhouse customers have raved online about the food, drinks and knowledgeable staff at the Annapolis restaurant. Its executive chef has made splashes of her own on the Bravo reality TV series “Below Deck.”

But a less visible aspect of the high-end Caribbean restaurant might catch diners’ attention: The eatery doesn’t allow tipping. Instead, staff receive pre-set wages, health care benefits and time off, with those costs already included in the menu prices.

At a time when tips seem expected everywhere from coffee shops to bakeries to carryouts, and many diners have reached peak gratuity fatigue, Rumhouse may be the first restaurant in Maryland to do away with the practice all together.

Coryse Brathwaite Zebovitz, a retired OB-GYN who opened the restaurant with her husband in May, said the eatery at 422 6th St. is inspired both by her Trinidadian roots and the couple’s trips abroad.

“When you travel in Europe, tipping is not a thing,” Brathwaite Zebovitz said, seated at a table on the restaurant’s wraparound porch. “You get an amazing meal that you know ahead of time what the cost is, and if you have a couple bucks left over, you just leave whatever’s left on the table.”

She thinks it leads to not only a better experience for diners, but for servers, too, who don’t need to depend on a steady flow of customers to pay their bills.

She’s not the first to point out problems with tipping, which has its roots in feudalism and took off in the U.S. after the Civil War. Critics say it leads to racism, sexism and exploitation of workers. In California, eateries like Zazie and the soon-to-open La Cigale have embraced tip-included models. “The West Coast is really ahead of us,” Brathwaite Zebovitz said.

Still, the broader culture has been slow to shift. Legislation that would require restaurants to pay servers more has seen mixed results. In Maryland, a proposal to increase the minimum wage for tipped workers to $20 per hour died in committee this year, and previous legislative efforts also failed.

Many long-term servers have themselves expressed concerns about moving away from a tipped model. One veteran waiter at a high-end Baltimore restaurant, who declined to give his name over concern it would affect his employment, said he would be reluctant to work at a business without tipping. He carefully tracks his annual hours and earnings, and calculated that his average hourly rate for the past year was $42.50. “I just don’t know how I can make an hourly rate that would be comparative,” he said. Starting salaries at Rumhouse range from about $23 to $25 per hour.

Yet Brathwaite Zebovitz sees reason to keep pushing. “There’s other intangibles with the tipping that I see often,” she said. “There’s a lot of profiling that happens … about the guests.”

Some servers avoid people of color, whom they stereotypically suspect will tip less. “Apparently Black women are poor tippers,” said Brathwaite Zebovitz, herself a Black woman, with a hint of sarcasm. “Who knew? I’m a great tipper.”

Tipping can also make it easier for employers to steal wages, and can lead to massive disparities in how much front of house staff like servers and bartenders earn versus how much back of house workers like line cooks can make per hour.

Yet the no-tipping policy is not always an easy sell for potential hires at Rumhouse. “No question, the first ones that we interviewed were like, ‘Oh, I don’t know,’” Brathwaite Zebovitz said. They worried they’d lose out on big earnings on busy nights. Rumhouse slightly increased its starting wage, and over time attitudes changed, with workers seeing the benefit to a predictable paycheck.

Even as many diners say tipping culture is out of control, some Rumhouse guests have expressed reservations about the policy, said Brathwaite Zebovitz. “There was a little bit of their egos built into being a big tipper or not,” she said. But the overall response has been positive. “I think everyone’s tired of [the demands for tipping], to be honest,” she said.

Other more famous restaurateurs have backtracked after attempting to do away with tipping. Shake Shack founder Danny Meyer ended a “tip included” policy at his New York restaurants in 2020.

But the policy was actually great for employees while it lasted, said Rumhouse bar manager Alan Denniberg, who worked at a Meyer-owned restaurant in New York until the pandemic in 2020. There, his starting wage was $30 an hour, and for his first time working in hospitality, he knew exactly how much money he’d make in a given week. He quickly worked his way up to head bartender. “I drank the Kool-Aid quick,” he said. He added that restaurants where servers don’t rely on tips make for a better working environment.

Consistency is particularly helpful in a seasonal town like Annapolis, according to general manager Richard Grow. “You experience your peaks in the summertime, making $200, $300 a night,” he said. “It makes it very hard to pay your bills come December, January, February.”

One reason many restaurateurs might shy away from a tip-included model: It’s expensive. As food costs are through the roof and tariffs are throwing a wrench into the already fragile supply chain, adding more full-time salaries and benefits to a business’s bottom line might wreck things. Brathwaite Zebovitz said Rumhouse’s no-tip policy forces her and her husband, a fellow doctor named Edward Zebovitz, to manage spending carefully and cut down on waste as much as possible. “We really are committed to the model,” she said.

For now, prices at Rumhouse are comparable to what diners might see at a similarly high-end restaurant in Annapolis, with cocktails in the range of $16 to $18 and entrees running $35 to $48. That may need to change at some point, Brathwaite Zebovitz said, if prices have to rise to cover the extensive labor costs.

But she’s keeping a long-term view. Once the restaurant is profitable, she plans to offer employees a share of the revenue. And beyond that, she wants staff to see waiting tables as a profession — not a gig.

“I want to see them grow from server to head server to want to run the place and maybe the next one we open,” Brathwaite Zebovitz said. “It’s quite an honor to be in the hospitality business.”