New Jersey restaurant rotates chefs between kitchen and dining room to equalize pay

At Lita, the open-hearth kitchen sits in the middle of the dining room, and the people cooking the food do not stay on one side of the pass for long. The Aberdeen Township restaurant built its pay model around a problem every restaurant worker knows: the front-of-house can walk with tips while the back-of-house relies on hourly wages that rarely keep up.

The concept gives non-management staff the same base salary, then splits tips evenly across the team. Chefs are cross-trained to work both the kitchen and the dining room, rotating between the two so the jobs and the money are not locked into the usual hierarchy. When they are in back of house, they earn a higher hourly rate and do not share in tips. When they move to the floor, they earn the tipped minimum wage plus pooled tips. Lita says that structure can bring a worker’s annualized pay to about $72,000, while the restaurant also covers roughly half of healthcare costs.

Lita opened in 2023 as a Spanish and Portuguese restaurant founded by Neilly Robinson and chef David Viana. It is the third restaurant from the pair, following Heirloom Kitchen and Heirloom at The St. Laurent. The name comes from Viana’s mother, Rosa Lita, whose family immigrated from Portugal to Newark in the 1970s. The restaurant’s integrated setup is part of the brand as much as the menu, which centers on Spanish and Portuguese tapas, paella and other dishes. That approach also helped put the restaurant on the map: Lita was a 2024 James Beard Awards semifinalist for Best New Restaurant, and Viana was a 2025 semifinalist for Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic.

The bigger test for the model is whether it can work outside a chef-driven restaurant with a tightly managed dining room and a kitchen designed to put both roles in the same space. In New Jersey, where the 2026 minimum wage for most employers is $15.92 an hour and the state still allows a tip credit for tipped workers, the issue is not abstract. Viana warned in 2025 that a proposal to eliminate the tip credit could raise what restaurants have to pay everyone in the building by roughly 10 percent.

Lita answers that fight with structure instead of abolition. It tries to erase the front-of-house and back-of-house divide by making the same people do both jobs, share tips and share in the restaurant’s upside. In an industry built on uneven pay and constant turnover, that is a rare attempt to make teamwork show up on the paycheck.