Chef Life: A Restaurant Simulator is a 2023 management game that immerses you in the life of a restaurant owner and chef. Time management, inventory management, financial management, and other skills are required. This game incorporates both fun and stressors. This guide will delve into some kitchen tips and habits to help you master the kitchen.
Table of contents
What is your style?
The type of prep and foods on your menu will be determined by the style of your restaurant. Are you the type who likes to get orders out quickly? Are you the type who likes to take their time and cook each dish from the time a customer orders it until Gaetano or Attilio delivers it to your customer? Are you an artist who enjoys personalizing each dish?
Fast Casual Restaurant
Fast-casual restaurants combine the convenience of a sit-down restaurant with the speed of a fast-food restaurant. This type of restaurant will have greater flexibility in terms of providing quick service and completing orders as quickly as possible.
Warmer dishes such as soups and stews will be served in these restaurants, as will cold dishes such as carpaccios, capreses, and cold soups. When considering this type of restaurant, you will be able to concentrate on soups and buy all three fridges and three warmers early on.
Pros
- Most of the work is performed during prep time.
- Quick turnaround
- Lower stress
- Sous chefs can work on quicker garnishes that require lower levels
- Hygiene will greater. With less need to have a prep sous chef, they can remain on cleaning duty or making extras
Cons
- Early game financial difficulties. The quick service dishes start off at a lower price point and only after a few upgrades or mid game recipes will have positive turn around.
- Responsibility difficulties. With the lower income in the beginning it is harder to purchase more local and national vendors which will cause responsibility to go lower.
- Sous Chefs will be less useful during service as they will be making garnishes or nothing at all. One of which can become a dishwasher.
Strategy
Prep period will be the busiest, but also the quickest, part of the day. This will be the case until higher-end versions of the recipe become available. At that point, the sous chef will need to assist in preparing any portion of the dish to reduce prep time.
Menu Items to go for early
- Caprese
- Cacio e pepe
- Onion Soup
- Summer Soup
- Beef Bourguinon
- Autumn Soup
- Beef Carpaccio
- Beef Meatballs (will need to cook right at start of service)
Fine Dining Restaurant
Fine dining restaurants will shift toward more specialty menus that will necessitate extensive preparation and cooking during service. Because of the complexity of the dishes, those at these restaurants tend to have higher price points and take longer to prepare.
More cooking equipment will be required as part of the equipment requirements. These can include oven-baked goods, grilled goods, and the use of specialized equipment such as a meat grinder, a meat slicer, and so on. This section will typically contain recipes for complex bistronomic or gastronic cuisine. If you are the artistic person who loves to customize every dish, it is also advisable to activate the Calm Service Preference to allow endless time to free plate every dish.
Pros
- More profits
- If Calm Service is used, then no time crunches
- Sous chefs of higher levels will allow for more flexibility
Cons
- Service Quality vs profit. Higher prices will require higher quality of ingredients and a smaller margin of error. Recommended to use higher prices at Level 25 when 4 star ingredients unlock.
- Sous Chef Story Progress required. Sous chef levels are capped based on their story progress at level 4, 9, and 14. For more assistance with leveling these sous chefs. Please reference the Sous Chef Story Guide.
Strategy
The goal of fine dining is to get high-profit items quickly and level up to reach the bistronomic menu items in research. Smaller menus are typically required to maintain low ingredient needs and more orders to expedite the leveling of recipes to higher, more profitable versions.
Menu items
Early menu item choices are solely based on profit unlocks. Beef meatballs and veal milanese are the first two items with high starting prices.
Contemporary Casual Restaurant
Contemporary casual restaurants combine the best of the previous two worlds. They are not required to provide inexpensive, quick service, but they are also not required to provide fine dining. These restaurants provide the flexibility to cater to trends by upscaling and downscaling menus that are changed almost daily to fit the seasons.
The equipment requirements are a good mix of the two. Some days, more refrigerators are needed than warmers. On other days, neither is used to any extent. The service here is essentially a teamwork-driven group’s dream, as dishes are prepared and pushed out by all members of the team, whether it’s a team effort or a single chef or sous chef in charge. Contemporary casual restaurants combine the best of the previous two worlds. They are not required to provide inexpensive, quick service, but they are also not required to provide fine dining. These restaurants provide the flexibility to cater to trends by upscaling and downscaling menus that are changed almost daily to fit the seasons.
Pros
- Fast service for some items and still allowing the chef to cook some items and be more involved during service.
- Sous Chef team will be able to contribute to these dishes and have less demands.
- Able to mange menus based on the team members working on prep that day
- Able to complete more story missions for the city with easy.
Cons
- Profits are not always guaranteed in the beginning as depending on the menu some item trends might be lower cost. Editing menu prices will alleviate this.
- Depending on the level of the sous chefs, this will either cause more demand on the head chef to prep or allow them the freedom to research recipes.
Strategy
Make items based on trends and however you want the restaurant to work. Recommendations are to have a mix of quick service to allow for better turnaround.
Fast Fine Dining
Fast Fine Dining is a new restaurant style that I developed while testing it on my stream. This is a late-game playstyle in which you use your sous chefs and quick service to create fine dining quickly. You will be able to have your sous chefs cook and plate the dishes once their quests are completed. Planning a menu based on the strengths of the chefs working that night will ensure the best process.
Pros
- Extremely quick turnaround time as orders complete within seconds
- Chef motivation remains high as they get to cook what they are best at which drastically increases their speed.
Cons
- Dilemma missions where a chef needs to go home can throw off your plans. Sometimes employees will have to go home sick, get hurt, or have other plans. You can lower their motivation and speed to keep them or allow them to go home for some small benefits.
Strategy
- Morning
- Set up the menu with 2 dishes for each of your planned chefs tonight and add a 5th that either is for them or another that they can’t cook fast for you .
- Prep
- Any prep items that are not catered to your sous chef skills should be made ready.
- Service
- Immediately make your sous chefs cook their specialty dishes and make one of each twice.
- Always have plated 2 of each dishes. I have found this to be a fairly balanced number. occasionally you might need to make a third, but it’s rare.
Better cooking habits
We can move on to more important matters now that you have an idea of what type of restaurant suits your style. Building a solid foundation will allow you to tackle more difficult tasks with ease.
No shame in lower difficulties
When the tutorial is finished, Day 4 begins. The Preference Screen appears, and you can toggle modifiers for your preferences to make things easier. There is no shame in using these modifiers because they are a learning tool and will help those who are anxious about pressure and demands.
Preferences
- Calm Service
- Customers will never be annoyed if the timer runs out. This will eliminate the worry of running out of time and receiving poor grades from customers. This is useful for easing into the pressure, and when you can run through service quickly and easily, you can turn this setting off. This setting is also suitable for those who are artistic and wish to use the free plating feature to create dishes for each customer, as no timer will allow them to do so.
- Few Customers
- This will lower the amount of dishes to cook. Dishes will be automatically cooked and served for some customers.
- Recipe Reminders
- This is a great feature for time management when learning new recipes or re-creating old favorites. I started using this feature, and it has saved my life. The cooking hud will completely update to remind you which phase of cooking an ingredient is added to, as well as if something needs to be covered.
- Cooking Assistance
- Food can’t burn or fail, but will lead to bad habits since you won’t know you have them.
Don’t run before you can walk
As exciting as it is to race to the top, a solid foundation is required to support that growth. Rapid advancement causes undue stress, which leads to poor service and quality.
Begin small. The game enforces three menu items; adding more at the start is not necessary. When growth reaches the point where preparing a single dish requires too many requirements, such as an estimate that 8–9 guests may order this. At this point, adding another dish to help spread out the orders will help.
The complexity and requirements of recipes will increase dramatically as they progress from casual cuisine to gastronomic cuisine. The capstone you unlock on day 2 is a good example. This is a five-ingredient simple item in casual cuisine. The preparation will yield 1 caprese. When it becomes a gastronomic dish, it contains several ingredients and requires five items to plate the caprese. The level 1 version requires no prep during service and can be quick, but if a customer orders the gastronomic version, it will cause mass havoc if only one person works this dish and is down for the entire timeframe with active orders constantly coming in.
Having a small set of recipes and learning how to manage a small set that grows with you will lead to future success.
Prep is your best friend
Preparation time used wisely can lead to more successful nights. If you make the most of this time, it’s as if you have cheat codes for the service afterwards.
Some recipes include checkpoints that allow you to prepare that portion and have it ready when service begins.
Caprese, which is learned on Tutorial Day 2, is an early example of this. You can either go to the mixing table and prepare that part of the dish during prep time, or you can chop mozzarella, chop tomatoes, and make the balsamic cream and waste all the slots in the fridge. This accomplishes two things: first, you only need one step to plate this dish during service, and second, you save two slots out of the nine available in the fridge now.
When making sauces or stews, always place them on the warmer with the pot. Do not remove them and place them on the warming tray. These items will deteriorate and be discarded at the service. Anything left in a pot or saucepan warmer will be served at the beginning of service. The first example is green beans.
Get acquainted with the recipes. There are steps that state that the item can be made ahead of time and stored in the fridge or warmer. Always aim for the step near the end of the recipe because it has the fewest prep steps before serving.
Menu Management
Managing the menu is critical for a successful or unsuccessful night. It’s tempting to put the most expensive dish on the menu, but most of the time, these dishes have extremely long preparation steps that could stymie your service. Recognizing time-saving recipes will help.
Veal milanese is an early example. The first version of this dish calls for slicing the veal escalope, making parmesan bread crumbs, obtaining flour, and beating an egg. All for the sake of breading this dish for a single cut. The Salad in this dish, on the other hand, takes the same number of steps but yields three salads. To accommodate this, the breaded veal would need to be done twice more. As a result, the prep time for three cuts of meat triples. When any of your sous chefs work on those dishes, Veal does not receive a speed bonus.
Meatballs, on the other hand, can be made in the same amount of time as one breaded veal, allowing for two sets. When cooked, one of these yields three servings.
Early in the game, it is best to stick to a small three-dish menu to save money and time. It’s also a good idea to make the other two menu items quick service items that can be prepared once and serve 3-4 people.
Knowing your sous chefs’ bonuses will also be beneficial. It is critical to choose items for the day’s menu based on the service staff you will be using that night.
- Kassim complements all
fish dishes. - Adele complements all
meat dishes. - Jiro complements all
vegetarian dishes.
Familiarize yourself with the recipes.
Learning your recipes will greatly improve your service. You don’t have to memorize these, but knowing if a recipe calls for this or that pan will come in handy.
How does this help? You and the sous chefs each have five pieces of each cookware to use together. If you have multiple recipes that only require the fry pan, the cleaning process will take a long time. You and your sous-chef will have gone through those pans. To keep up with the work load, the dish washer takes a while to run and will require you to stop cooking and assist with washing.
Having a mix of items that have different cookware requirements or quick service items that do not require any items will be extremely beneficial. Having a diverse menu that allows for the different strengths of the sous chefs and is not skewed toward one piece of cookware.
Kitchen Layout
The kitchen will evolve along with you. More workstations can be placed with more space. Setting these items in the appropriate locations will help. Now, you can arrange your workstations however you want, but here are some suggestions.
- Because the serving station is closer to the front, it wouldn’t hurt to have the warmers and refrigerators closer as well.
- It’s also a good idea to keep the cooking ranges near the center of the room, near the fridges and warmers.
- A sink placed near the pots and cooking range will allow for faster cleanup and water filling.
- Seasoning shelf near cookware and prep areas
- Other less frequently used cooking devices can be found in the next area away from the service area.
- The rest can be setup anywhere.
