San Diego restaurateurs, who had been fretting for months about the prospect of having to stop tacking surcharges onto diners’ bills to help cover rising costs, have gotten an 11th-hour reprieve.

With just two days to go before a new law barring so-called junk fees was to go into effect, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Saturday signed emergency legislation that will free California restaurants from what would have been an effective ban on surcharges that drinking and dining venues have been using for years to help defray costs largely related to rapidly rising wages and health care benefits.

At issue was a state bill, Senate Bill 474, that is designed to combat hidden fees levied by a variety of businesses, from ticket sales vendors and delivery apps to restaurants and hotels. But it was the automatic restaurant service charges that received the most attention.

One of the bill’s co-authors, Bill Dodd, D-Napa, had previously said he never intended his bill to encompass restaurant surcharges. But a recent set of guidelines released by the state Attorney General’s Office concluded that the bill clearly applied to dining venues unless the added fees — typically 3 percent to 6 percent in San Diego — were incorporated into the cost of each menu item.

The net effect, said Attorney General Ron Bonta, is to eliminate “bait and switch tactics” so consumers are aware upfront what the total cost is for a good or service they’re purchasing.

“The law is simple,” he said last month. “The price you see is the price you pay,” Bonta said. “Laws work when everyone can comply.”

Dodd jumped into action, introducing emergency legislation that would specifically exempt restaurants and bars from SB474 by simply requiring them to disclose upfront any additional fees “clearly and conspicuously” on menus or “other displays,” something they were already doing.

“Restaurant customers shouldn’t be surprised when they get their checks by a slew of extra charges they were not expecting,” Dodd said earlier this month when his bill, SB1524, was introduced. “Many restaurants are upfront with their business practices but too many aren’t, necessitating action. This proposal will level the playing field for all restaurants and address confusion and disagreement about what is permissible under state law.”

The bill unanimously passed both the state Assembly and Senate this week and had been awaiting Newsom’s signature before the July 1 effective date of the junk fee law.

Restaurateurs had been preparing to comply with the law, rewriting menus and raising menu prices by a few percentage points to help offset the loss of dependable revenue from the surcharges, which admittedly, have not been especially popular with diners.

Ironically, some San Diego restaurateurs are deciding to ditch the surcharges altogether, having already moved forward with incorporating the added fee into individual items on their menus.

“We were adjusting prices to embed the surcharge into the menu so we had redone all the menu pricing to recoup our 4 percent surcharge and were ready to go live July 1,” said Brad Wise, chef and owner of San Diego’s Trust Restaurant Group, who had been using the revenue to help cover increased wages and matching 401(k) contributions.

“On this, it was a group decision. I walked around the restaurants and talked about it with our employees and said, ‘What do you guys want to do?’ They said we’d rather have you embed it in the menu so we don’t have to keep having those awful conversations (with the diners).”

Wise, whose portfolio of restaurants includes Trust, Fort Oak, Cardellino and multiple locations of his steakhouse brand, Rare Society, had already boosted menu prices once before this year, on Jan. 1, when San Diego’s minimum wage rose, as it does every year.

He said he and his staff are cheered, however, by the new law signed by Newsom because it now preserves what is an increasingly common practice by restaurants to include an automatic gratuity — usually 20 percent —  for parties of six or more.

“The staff had been in an uproar before when they thought we wouldn’t be able to include a 20 percent service charge for six or more people because larger parties sometimes don’t tend to tip the average gratuity,” Wise said.

Like Wise, Niccolò Angius of Cesarina and Elvira restaurants in the Point Loma/Ocean Beach area, had been on the fence about whether to keep his restaurants’ surcharges in place should emergency legislation come through.

“As of right now, we want to wait and see what the general public thinks about this,” Angius said. “I have a feeling that in general, the public may have built up the wrong idea about the fee so it could be counterproductive to keep it. We haven’t made an executive decision yet.

“We were prepared, though, and we had reprinted our menus without the fee. Now we want to take time to see how the public feels about it, so there’s a chance we could add it back.”

The new price increases for his Italian restaurants are modest, he said, about 2 percent on average, which is less than the 4 percent fee that had been added to diners’ checks.

The California Restaurant Association, which had been lobbying for some kind of relief from the junk fee law, is pleased that restaurants will get to keep their surcharges.

“SB1524 will provide additional clarity and transparency on how certain food service establishments and restaurants must communicate their pricing models to guests prior to any purchase,” said Matthew Sutton, senior vice president of Government Affairs and Public Policy for the trade group.