>>From what I know in real life, kitchen may not get anything at all, and there's nothing stopping the waiter to type numbers slightly lower than real, and keep the difference in his private pocket.
>
>I think that, in this country, the kitchen staff always get a share.

There are exceptions to everything. The one I know had the owner of Scottish descent :).

>Oddly, a restaurant is still allowed to pay less than the minimum wage and rely on payments from the tronc to raise it above the minimum.

Unbelievably, it worked the same in Hungary - at least in the seventies that I know of, but don't see why not before and after - during the strictest system of planned economy and controlled market. The waiters' salary would decrease with the distance to the center of Budapest; what they were getting paid in the best restaurants wouldn't cover bare necessities. And yet there was a long waiting list, connections were pulled, palms were greased - just to get assigned to one of those badly paid positions.

And these guys knew how to extract a tip... when you pay, he pulls out a handful of coins, reasonably expecting that you'd wave it off. You wouldn't spoil a good evening with a few minutes of coin counting, would you?

Still... I've already spoken on the matter - don't see why to repeat.