Following this week’s revelations about Cote’s unfair service charge policy, another of its employees in south London has confirmed the worst.

Cote, which owns a massive 72 restaurants, 30 of which are in London, claims that the automatic 12.5 per cent service charge added automatically to the customer’s bill, contributes to the £7.50 - £8 hourly rate for its staff.

The waitress who wished to remain anonymous, said: "I would much rather have a minimum wage but keep the tips, all of us would. The best option for customers is not to pay the service charge. Unless it’s a cash tip, we get nothing."

The Cote employee said: "They say it goes towards our wages but to be honest I could make my salary in service charges in one shift.

"On a good day I can make £300 in tips but it gets funnelled to the company so instead I’m making £300 a week."

The additional service charge is added automatically to Cote bills and customers need to ask for it to be removed if they don’t want to pay it.

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The staff member said: "If customers leave a cash tip then sometimes we can keep it, but other times the general managers and area managers will still take some money from the tip.

"One time a table left me a very large tip and I kept it. The manager was threatening they couldn’t afford to pay time for holidays and had to cut hours in the future unless more service charges were collected."

The chain, which showed profits of £16.3m last year, issued a statement saying that it didn’t recognise the service charge as revenues in its account because it is paid through its payroll, net of taxes and NI contributions.

The waitress said: "The manager gets in trouble if the service charge is taken off by the area managers and then we don’t receive anything."

Cote has informed News Shopper that contrary to recent press reports "Cote distributes the service charge income to the restaurant level employees at which the service charge was collected." 

If you work at one of the Cote restaurants in the local area and want to speak to us about your experiences please email james.parsons@london.newsquest.co.uk