A zillion years ago when I worked in a fancy restaurant for a few weeks, I discovered that yes, free dinner was part of the deal — but it wasn't necessarily anything from the menu!

I worked waitstaff for a few years during summers. the "free food" was what roles and sniches you could take. We got meals for 1/2 off if you ever took a real break. and then you usually got something cheep cuz you didn't want to cut into your tips.

some places feed you, some don't
some places give actual discounts on food, others don't
the one thing that is constant is that they have no choice on what they are told to tell tables to eat - no matter what it is. Your just their monkey to sell food.

I've worked in a couple places and one did give us food, and the other was a joke. The country club that I worked for gave us one meal per shift that was supposed to come out to less than some arbitrary amount. The way it was interpreted, we could have just about anything off the lunch menu, and selected stuff off the dinner menu. I used to get better stuff by letting the chef try out his newest ideas on me and giving him feedback. But both the head chef and the cold chef liked me and were willing to pamper me. After they lost the head waiter who had stood between me and some pretty bad harrassment (nobody messed with his staff and got away with it.), I left and went to a box restaurant.

Bad move. They gave waitstaff some trifling discount on the meals, but you couldn't really afford to eat there, so most of the waitstaff simply filched soup, salad, and breadsticks, since that was what we had open access to. Management took a snit and began charging some ridiculous amount for all of the above. Theft became rampant. At one point, I saw a woman hauling an entire bag (containing an evening's worth of soup) out to her car. When I was promoted, briefly, to bottom-level management, they tried to put me in charge of seeing that it didn't happen. Yeah, sure. A month later, I quit/was fired and took several others with me.