Dolores Park was flooded with people enjoying one of the first warm afternoons of the year. Among sunbathers, revelers celebrating birthdays, and photographers capturing the views on Saturday, one 26-year-old circulated a petition to ban restaurant surcharges.
“It’s always been sort of a minor annoyance,” said Nicholas Currault, a software engineer who has lived in San Francisco for about four years. Now, he, his friend David Rayson, and a handful of other volunteers are collecting signatures to get a measure outlawing surcharges on the June 2026 ballot.
But Currault was solo Saturday — Rayson was out with a foot injury — as he traveled between groups of people on benches and in the grass with a clipboard:
“Interested in getting rid of surcharges? Keep restaurants honest?”
The signatures came quickly. In California, this issue has history.
Here’s the story you may have heard: state legislators passed a junk fee ban in 2023, but they capitulated to the restaurant lobby and passed a carve-out right before the law went into effect last summer. State Sen. Scott Wiener, one of the lawmakers who introduced the “carve-out” bill, tells the story differently.
“The original hidden-fee state law, which I supported, was intended to crack down on big corporations that surprise people with fees — for example, Ticketmaster and hotel resort fees,” Wiener said in a statement to The Standard. “It was never intended to cover local mom-and-pop restaurants that are frequently barely getting by.”
But California Attorney General Rob Bonta decided, after the junk-fee ban passed, that it applied to restaurants anyway. This went against the spirit of the original law, Wiener said, which is why he and other legislators introduced Senate Bill 1524.
This restaurant exemption bill, he went on, makes clear that restaurants must clearly and conspicuously disclose gratuities or other fees on their menus, so the charges aren’t really hidden at all. That law, which passed both chambers of the legislature unanimously, goes into effect July 1.
Assemblymember Matt Haney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Wiener’s narrative did not satisfy Currault, who, along with a sizable cadre of angry Redditors, said he was “baffled by the last-minute carve-out.” A survey by the San Francisco Chronicle found that of more than 1,000 respondents, 81% said restaurant surcharges should be outlawed.
Luke Anthony, a 48-year-old owner of an antique shop in the Castro, was one of the first people to sign Currault’s petition Saturday.
“I think it’s a good initiative,” he said. “When you go to a restaurant, it’s just easier if you know what you’re paying up front.”
He joins about 100 people who have already signed since Currault and Rayson started collecting signatures on March 1, Currault said. They’ll need about 10,400 names by mid-August for the proposition to qualify for the ballot.
It’s not lost on Currault, who says he has no outside funding, that many ballot initiatives qualify through paid signature gatherers.
“If someone said, ‘I love this, and I’ve got money to spare; I’ll throw $100K at you right now,’ I’d be like, ‘Great!” he said. But he’s not holding his breath. “It’s no one’s No. 1 issue.”
Laurie Thomas, executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, agrees with Currault that restaurants shouldn’t hide any charges.
“Nobody should ever mislead the customer,” Thomas said. “That’s bad business.”
Even so, she is firmly against his effort.
“We would be very disappointed if this went through,” Thomas said, explaining that hidden fees are already illegal. Her rationale is that if surcharges were folded into menu prices, more customers would get sticker shock — another challenge for already-struggling restaurants. Another objection is that Currault’s effort exempts third-party delivery services.
“It’s not like you can see surcharges when you order from UberEats and DoorDash,” Thomas said. “It seems discriminatory against restaurants, which in the city are mostly small businesses.”
Currault said he wasn’t against further regulating delivery services, and would be “open to supporting [GGRA] to optimize for transparency everywhere.”
Other people see different solutions to the problem.
“I personally believe restaurants should just be paying a fair wage to the worker,” said Yeshey Jantsho, 30, an education professional who was enjoying the sunshine with a couple of friends. She added that dining in SF is already expensive without surcharges, and patrons should at least know what they’re paying.