Restaurants Counter Outside Cakes With Cakeage Fees

Cakes are meaningful, so it is no surprise that people sometimes bring them along to a restaurant as a celebratory coda to a special meal. And it’s no surprise that restaurants don’t always like it.

So restaurants often charge customers to cut and plate the cake. Sometimes they add a scoop of ice cream. The practice has come to be called cakeage. It’s a play on corkage, the fee a restaurant levies to open a bottle of wine brought by the customer.

Neal McCarthy, who owns the Atlanta restaurant Miller Union with the chef Steven Satterfield, takes things a step further. His private Instagram account is filled with photographs of cakes customers have carried into Miller Union. He pokes fun at grocery store monstrosities and cakes fashioned from chocolate chip cookie dough, cracking wise about garish icing and other questionable decorative choices.

“It’s like my comic relief and my only way of getting back at people, even though I do it secretly,” Mr. McCarthy said. “These people sought out a nice restaurant, yet they undermine it by bringing in the world’s most hideous cakes.”

Like many in the business, he views the practice of taking cake to a restaurant that employs a pastry chef an abomination.