This strikes me as really dumb. An efficiency that the diner would never notice and he wants to make his staff work harder to prove a point. Way to make people resent their work.
He believes it will bleed into other things where it does make a difference. So he takes a 0 tolerance policy into cheating so it doesn't become a habit and a culture and instead hopes to instill the value of not taking shortcuts as a measure to prevent a lapse.
As a programmer, this still seems overly dogmatic. Why not just develop the discipline to put effort where it's actually needed instead of burning gas all around like a moron? Every programmer knows this. The extreme dogma seems the real lack of discipline to me.
As a programmer I probably don't know very much about how to run a kitchen, the kinds of people that work in them, and the reasonable expectations the kitchen manager might have. Not to mention, the outcome of the majority of software project is failure lol.