That really is an abuse of employees to enforce non-competes on restaurant workers. There's nothing proprietary or top secret from one place to another, it's just a way to screw someone over if they leave so that they have no choice but to stay. In the UK and EU, we prohibit non-competes specifically to stop this kind of employer power over employees, seeing it essentially as a form of modern-day indentured slavery.

On the other hand, for extremely top-level managers or workers with access to commercially sensitive information, I can understand the desire for non-competes, but we would typically solve that by having contractually agreed long notice periods (putting people on gardening leave for the notice period) and NDAs.