After restaurant service fees were fully legalized earlier this month, Flea Street Cafe owner Jesse Cool sent customers an email with a breakdown of where the Menlo Park restaurant’s charge goes.

One of the most fascinating parts of putting a bunch of service fees together in one list, as the Chronicle’s food team did recently with 100 San Francisco restaurants, is seeing how each business decides to present them.

Starting July 2025, California restaurants will be required to clearly indicate their service charges, generally by using different typographical treatments wherever menu prices are displayed, but for now, there’s little regulation of the presentation of these fees, which run the gamut from 30% to 5% of the diners’ checks.

I reached out to six standouts from the list — chosen because of their high fees, distinctive phrasing, or both — to ask how representatives justified the costs they imposed on diners. How did they arrive at their numbers? What does “the cost of doing business” mean, and how is that different from regular old business considerations? Is this a tip or not?

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I imagined that they’d be ready to talk. Service fees, according to the powerful California Restaurant Association, are all about “transparency in pricing.” Yet only one restaurant’s representative was willing to engage.

Black Cat jazz bar and lounge adds a 20% service charge (“to ensure a living wage”) and a 10% “SF safety and benefit charge” to its bills.

At the top of the range of service fees is Black Cat, a jazz bar and lounge in the........

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