At Noma Mexico, Servers Are Called ‘Nerds’

• At Noma Mexico, they don’t call the waiters servers or staffers or team members — they call them nerds.

• Cara Stadler, one of Maine’s most well-known chefs, is abandoning her five month-old no-tipping policy at her pair of restaurants Bao Bao Dumpling House in Portland and Tao Yuan in Brunswick after recently reviewing the books. Customers balked at the higher prices and ordered less food, and the restaurants didn’t have enough funds to cover the higher wages of the employees. Stadler had hoped to add an 18 percent service charge to all checks and use that to pay higher wages across the staff, but Maine doesn’t allow it. Legislators are considering revising the law to allow for automatic service charges, and if that happens, Stadler may try the whole no-tipping experiment again.

• Celebrity chef and chef to celebrities Wolfgang Puck got his promised Walk of Fame star yesterday.

• A waitress at a Cracker Barrel comped the meal of a mom with an autistic kid and wrote her a sweet note.

• Hai Di Lao, a Sichuan restaurant chain out of China that is known for giving massages and manicures to guests while they wait, plans to expand massively over the next year and will open 10 more stores in the U.S. and UK. They only have one Stateside location right now, in Los Angeles.

• The internet is obsessed with this photo of Beyonce ordering dinner.