Being a short-order cook is a trade you can be trained for in a few shifts. Sure, you can get great at it over many years, but you're done learning most of what

Being a short-order cook is a trade you can be trained for in a few shifts. Sure, you can get great at it over many years, but you're done learning most of what you need to learn in a year, tops. Working a station at a fine dining restaurant requires YEARS of knowledge built through experience, and usually, a culinary arts degree. That someone working a station in a Michelin starred restaurant wouldn't be as good at short-order cooking as an experienced short order cook is like judging an automotive engineer by comparing how quickly they do oil changes compared to a guy working at jiffy lube. Beyond that, those fine dining cooks have probably worked at paces that would make those short order cooks heads spin. Manhattan restaurants will easily do 500 covers on a weekend night and the amount of work that goes into each dish is absolutely incomparable. In the last fine dining place I worked in, one of my shifts was always in the pastry station-- those plates involved made-to-order tuiles, made-to-order sugar decorations, foams... and that all needs to be coordinated with everybody else in the kitchen. At a diner, they put stuff on a hot surface to make it hot and put it on a plate and the whole process takes about a minute, so you don't even have to talk to anyone, let alone calmly strategize while you're literally on fire. Those line cooks could walk into a diner and get dragged for the first two shifts by guys that have been cooking the same 15 dead simple dishes for a few years, and then by the third shift they'd be everybody's boss. One of those diner guys would walk into a michelin starred restaurant for a stage and ten minutes later, after failing to chop onions with the requisite precision, they'd be handed a mop or told to go home.