In a lot of restaurants, the tips are not just for your waiter. They are split with the wait staff, the bar, the bus boys, the kitchen and the entrance staff.
So if you have the doorman, the coat checker, the seater, the sommelier, the waiter, the bus staff, and the dish washers, you might have 8+ people who will be splitting your tip. At Applebees, you might have the tip split between 3 or 4 people at the most.
Never occurred that way in the several restaurants I cooked in over more than a decade working in kitchens in MN for this cat.
Cooks never got gratuity unless they worked functions that served several hundred and at that it was a pittance (3% is what I recall). The setup crew got a lot more in tips than did the cooks for functions. I never had any waitstaff offer to split tip money with me, nor did I see them do it for any other cooks/chefs anywhere I worked. Most places I worked at I built up clientele that dwarfed what had been the norm on nights I cooked (a normally dead Sunday night of 10 people max would be 60 - 100 within a month to six weeks of my regularly cooking that shift). That made the waitstaff very happy and a lot of extra tip money, but I never once saw any gratuity for it.
On an extremely rare occasion a patron would send a tip back for the cook/chef, but I suspect a lot of that was pocketed by waitstaff as well. Waitstaff got minimum wage plus tips (which they had to declare as income - 15% at tax time of their wages was assumed in MN), while cooks got a considerably better wage (usually a few dollars per hour over minimum wage). The cooks worked a lot more hours (60 - 70 hours a week or more was not uncommon, especially during the holidays), so I’d say we got the raw deal there. Waitstaff can easily make up a few dollars per hour in tips and usually more than doubled their income, so I never understood why they got all of, or at least the lion’s share of the gratuity... In most cases a good cook will make the tip for the waitstaff as long as they aren’t slow, while a bad cook will wreck it for the waitstaff no matter what (in most cases anyhow).