It's not realistic to be able to compete in an already ruthless, tight margin industry like that while also handicapping yourself in that way if nobody else is. How can you get customers to choose your business when your prices are so much higher on the menu to account for paying 10x higher wages? How do you attract good staff to work for you if their pay is capped like that? How do you stop people from calling out on busy nights like Fridays and Saturdays because they'd be making a Tuesday wage for the extra work or double that if they work somewhere else? People are generally speaking pretty dumb, so they'll see that my burger is $18 across the street from an identical $15 burger, not understand that tipping 20% raises that $15 cost to $18, and call me a cheap bastard for charging so much more for nothing.

New small business restaurants are already notorious for shutting down within a year or two of opening. The only ways to achieve this are with a massive starting capital to be able to withstand operating at a loss for years while proving reputation to both customers and workers, or bigger established brands doing it first to normalize it, or by raising tipped minimum wages higher legally so that every company is moving in that direction together. Or (my preference) by banning the tipped minimum wage from being separate from minimum wage in the first place.

The whole function of a business in this system is to make money. It's not sensible to intentionally choose to make less money. So long as we latch onto capitalism as a system, companies will largely only do the bare minimum as required by regulations in order to keep costs as low as possible while maintaining competitive pricing. The only companies that can afford to do things differently are privately owned companies that have already established themselves as major successes and can afford to buy some extra good will at the cost of growth or even a little financial loss. I don't like it any more than you do, but this is what we've got until the people demand more or a different system entirely. Maybe when the boomers all fuck off and die. Who knows.

I averaged $35 an hour at my restaurant in tips alone (they paid me $13 an hour to run the whole place including serving back in 2001). They could not afford me. A good server will never work that job again if they got your deal. Then you’d bitch moan and complain about bad service.