The Cat 'n Fiddle Pub — Restaurant in Calgary

The Cat 'n Fiddle has decent deals on wings and a wide selection of drinks. Welcoming staff and interesting food and drink specials for each day of the week.

We used to like going here for group events until recently where they have decided to impose a mandatory 18% gratuity for groups.

A gratuity should always be voluntary to show appreciation for good service and indeed I would always tip well, but I do not like being forced to pay a set amount. If the purpose of forced tipping is to ensure no-one in the group forgets to tip to ensure a living wage, then the restaurant should pay a living wage rather than forcing customers to make up for inadequate wages. However, these days we do have a decent minimum wage therefore the auto-tipping should not be necessary.

The definition of gratuity is something that is given freely beyond what is required, so "auto-gratuity" is not given freely and the term auto-gratuity is an oxymoron.

Regardless of my opinion on auto-tipping, the fee should at least be agreed in advance by either a notice on the menu or informed by our server prior to ordering, neither of which happened. We only found out about the fee at the end when we received the bill.

Again, I'm not against the option of tipping and I always tip my server appropriately, but I do not like being forced to do so for a set amount.

I hope The Cat 'n Fiddle decide to reverse this policy in the future or I guess we'll have to look elsewhere for regular group events which is a shame since I like the bar and have not had any complaints over the years. EDIT BASED ON REPLY FROM BAR: That's great and thanks for acknowledging our concerns! Since you have listened and reversed the policy I'm now happy, so am changing the rating to give more stars....

Food was AMAZING, I spoke with the head chef Kevin I believe his name was. he was awesome, he wasn’t on shift but recommended his favourites and was nothing but kind to me and my friends. We had a pretty bad experience with our server Alex or Anna or some simple white girl name. So we went to the bar and the bartender was so sick, he flipped the entire Expieriance, we asked his recommendation for food because our old server was one of the most miserable people I had ever met and hadn’t recommended anything but an eye role to our table. But the second we settled with her and switched to the bar, the first time we asked him he told us to try the bacon Mac and two of us did where the other two of us tried his second recommendation the beef dip. SO AMAZING!!! Because of his recommendations on the food we asked about drinks, my one friend Jordan hadn’t been very experienced in a bar but jager let him try a couple of the beers on tap before he came to realize he was a hazy IPA type of guy. The fact that the bartender went out of his way while the place was PACKED to find him a beer he enjoyed was a customer service Expieriance like no other.

GOES TO SHOW, ONE BAD SERVER DOESN'T MEAN A PLACE OF BUSINESS HAS BAD SERVICE.

We proceeded to win a bit of money of the VLTS which just made the night that much better but as I live just off 23 ave this will be me and the guys go to spot when we are at my house so long as that bartender is...

They finished a 9 week tournament of trivia. It was great fun. We started 2 weeks late but were able to play in the final playoffs. Your total score only got you into the finals, not to necessarily win. We did not win the grand prizes as those were random draws, that's fine. After all when a bar owner puts up that much money the purpose is to draw people in not reward the best teams, they have nightly prizes for that. If you read the rules it was never supposed to be a purely merit based tournament. If you only play trivia to win, oh well. This was a good tournament. I was glad that teams who never had a chance at winning the top score won the big prizes through random draws, thats what keeps people playing and makes if fun. I know lots of teams had fun with it and have been playing there for years. There is a nightly prize that is based on merit, but really often comes down to one question, you win some you lose some,...