At one point in 2021, Jasmine Sharma was so exasperated with her low tips at the Jon & Vinny’s restaurant in Fairfax that she learned to approach almost every diner with what she dubbed her “monologue.”

“Hi, all. Here is the check. Take your time, no rush at all.” She said she’d seek to explain an 18% service fee added to the check to each customer. “If you do want to leave an additional tip, it is more than appreciated, not required,” she would say.

Sometimes people would hear Sharma out. Other times they were too tipsy to listen. Often, she got a question: “What do you mean you’re not getting the tip?”

Sharma started her table-side performance when she noticed diners were leaving her less in tips for her service. The confusion about the 18% service fee, she said, generated an uproar among the servers, some of whom sent angry emails to upper management and agitated to meet with them for an explanation as to how the service fee was being allocated.

Sharma is part of a class-action lawsuit filed Tuesday in Los Angeles Superior Court against Joint Venture Restaurant Group, Inc., which owns Jon & Vinny’s. The workers claim that the company denied them tips and therefore shortchanged them on their take-home pay because of confusion resulting from the 18% service fee.

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