I don't think this analogy conveys anything particularly useful. The reasons most restaurants don't charge Michelin star prices are:

* Ingredient costs go up rapidly too.

* Because of that, the profit margins are narrow in the restaurant business at all restaurant price levels. There are rich restauranteurs here and there but owning a high end restaurant is still a very risky business venture and many are barely scraping by.

* You become talent bound. Finding chefs who can prepare food at that level is hard. Designing a good menu is very hard. Food is like any other creative art, you can't just arbitrarily decide to make amazing food—many try and fail.

* There is limited demand. Most people can't afford to eat high end food often and even those who can often don't want to go to the same restaurant over and over.

I don't see how any of this maps to the topic being discussed.

If we're talking about construction work in South-East Asia, the same basic principles apply. Limited demand because there really aren't that many foreigners relative to locals (and some of the foreigners don't have more money than the local middle class anyway), and satisfying the foreigners' more exacting standards, weird ideas about construction and insistence on exotic materials needs more skill than most local construction workers possess, and competent English. That means most people in construction are only going to get to work for a wealthy Westerner through a middleman, and that middleman is going to pay them the standard local rates.