When Emily Elliott moved to New York from North Carolina almost 12 years ago, she handed out resumes in the East Village and slept on her sister’s couch. Two weeks went by and no one hired her. Just as she was starting to feel desperate, Colors, a new restaurant cooperative in NoHo focusing on fair wages and equality, offered her a position as a line cook.

Ms. Elliott found Colors, as she put it, “morally correct.” She recalled a Muslim cook who excused himself to pray in the locker area each day, even during peak hours. The staff, many of whom came from Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the World Trade Center that was destroyed during the Sept. 11 terror attacks, came from more than 20 countries. At Colors, staffers collaborated on a menu that reflected their various ethnicities — pad Thai, risotto, a Japanese-style smoked tuna. “It was like the Queens of restaurants,” Ms. Elliott said. “I never worked anywhere that was nearly as diverse.”

Six weeks later, Ms. Elliott quit. She wasn’t getting paid on time.

Working at a restaurant is a rite of passage for many New Yorkers. For some it’s a way to finance their dance classes or start-ups or screenplays. For countless others, it is simply a way to survive. But the model of working for cash in a restaurant is changing, as several businesses, in an effort to guarantee workers a better hourly rate, are doing away with tipping. There is also a campaign underway to raise the wages of tipped workers across the state and the country. Such changes could raise prices all around, affecting the entire food-service ecosystem in New York.

Increasing wages for food service workers is certainly a noble cause, one that aligned with the ideals of Colors when it first opened, in 2006. But good intentions are one thing; running a restaurant in a city as competitive as New York is quite another.