Cooking Simulator is a restaurant kitchen simulator from Big Cheese Studio released in 2019. The game gives you all the tools you need to make it as an acclaimed and famous chef — if you can master the pressures of the kitchen, that is.
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All the tension of a restaurant kitchen is emulated in Cooking Simulator through time limits, spills, smashes, and fire risks aplenty. While the multitasking skills of a chef might seem required to stay in control, the game thankfully contains ways to lessen that load.
For Starters
Although Career Mode, the main game mode, features an introduction tutorial, there’s a lot of knowledge that it assumes you already have. If you find you’re missing that knowledge, there’s a tutorial mode that is separate to Career next to it in the mode selector.
Cooking School provides you with the basic skills of the game — things like using utensils and containers, buying ingredients and how to serve up a dish.
Once you have these skills, anything that felt fully unexplained in Career Mode should be easier. This allows you to focus on cooking dishes that raise your fame, attract food critics and earn you stars.
Collision Course
Once you’re in the thick of it, the kitchen becomes a perilous place for breakable objects, since pushing a dish or bottle against a surface with mild force is likely to break it.
If you do drop a plate of non-liquid food, it is possible to pick up the dropped food with a new plate — something thing that restaurant guests seem not to notice or mention when rating a dish.
Aside from incredible poise, the only way to truly avoid smashes is to unlock the perks for indestructible plates and indestructible bottles, which, when applied, mean that they can take any amount of force and remain intact.
Out Of The Frying Pan
Navigating the kitchen, from moving your ingredients to plating food, can be tricky, since the way that containers work relies on you to interact in multiple ways.
In order to use a utensil, first pick it up, then select the surface or container to use it on, then move to interact with your target. Do not interact with that target before selecting its container. This may be why a knife won’t cut, or you threw the salmon out of the pan instead of flipping it.
You must have a light touch when pouring liquids in order to not add too much, and ensure the red direction indicator is at your intended pour spot to avoid spillages.
Otherwise, you could end up pouring your entire soup pot onto the counter, leaving you with nothing to serve. If pouring from the pot is too hard, you can buy a ladle from the utensils in the store, which doesn’t require any precision to transfer liquids.
You need to pour used water or cooking oils out from pots to clean them out for use again.
Into The Fire
Keep an eye on the cooking condition of your ingredients, which is indicated while hovering over them.
If the bar is filled with green, they’re ready, and if the bar starts filling with red, then they’re at risk of burning.
With a one pot dish like a soup, you may want to remember which ingredients cook faster (such as onions, in the case of the borscht), and add them in strategically the next time you cook it.
Do regular check-ins on ingredients in the oven, as their status can’t be seen without opening it first. If you find this frustrating, there is a perk which allows you to see the condition without opening the appliance.
There is a fire extinguisher on the wall by the storage racks for you to use if a fire does break out from burned food or a faulty device.
Skills To Pay The Bills
Make sure to use skill points tactically if you’re struggling, putting them towards things you find harder or goals you want to achieve.
For instance, if you keep failing to impress customers, you can put points into losing less fame. You can also modify reactions by putting points into making guests less fussy about the taste of the food, so you rate higher in general.
That’s one of several strategies to take, alongside maximizing profit and minimizing the risk of going under, making deadlines less intensive, making it cheaper to expand your menu, and so on, until hopefully you have a restaurant to be proud of on your hands.
