Polemicist Christopher Hitchens is calling on diners to collectively resist the “barbaric” way servers automatically refill diners’ wine glasses when they’ve got a bottle on the table. To Hitchens it’s a crisis not just because it’s clearly part of their conspiracy to inflate the bill (the faster the table kills one bottle, the sooner they order another) but also because they interrupt his anecdotes with their incessant reaching and pouring and serving. Hitchens’s call to......

When restaurants charge larger parties an automatic service fee – usually 20% – it’s generally understood that the money goes to the servers as a gratuity. But some restaurants have been keeping the lion’s share of the fee and passing along just a small fraction to the staff. Now a state appeals court has ruled that the practice is as illegal as it is outrageous. It took a lawsuit brought by the employees of World......