This is one of the most stressful games I've ever played. And I put over 20 hours into it over a period of weeks, always coming back to it to serve another day. You are running a restaurant, but the complexity of it severely outstrips your regular diner dash style game. Almost every food has multiple recipes (there are something like 35 different hamburger combinations possible), and your menu has upwards of 20 items, of which you can serve 4-6 on any given day. Manage service, janitorial requirements and a variety of other tasks. It's hard to describe how complex and yet how engaging this game is. It is seriously stressful, especially on the later levels, but pulling off 88 orders in a row perfectly is a rush; this is really an underrated and great game.

I enjoy cooking irl and I often play flash cooking games online. But this game makes me wanna set my computer on fire and kill myself. I thought I was gonna have fun and kill time with it. I got nothing but panic attacks!
Let me put it this way. You basically have to take control of EVERY SINGLE CHORE in the restaurant! EVERY. SINGLE. CHORE! Take orders, cook, serve, do the dishes, take the trash out, set traps for rats, stop burglers, take selfies with people, go on dates. Not to mention the stress in rush hours while an inspector is watching you, so you try your best not to miss a single chore. All while cooking for impatient ungrateful bastards who don't even flush the toilet, so I have to do that too!
This game will hurt you mentally, physically and emotionally. Because as cute and yummy as the the food will look, you will hate every single person who makes an order. Because while you finish making a fun delicious burger. You've probably missed or burned at least 4 other orders and also hurt your arm or broke a finger, from mashing every single button as fast as you can. This makes Hell's Kitchen look like a fairy land.
But despite all that, it's so addicting and surprisingly fun. The kind of game you will keep going back to, even for just 5 minutes to see if you can do better, which you won't!

Cook, Serve, Delicious is not your average restaurant sim. Instead of waiting tables and clearing checks, you’re more of a line cook who owns a small restaurant in a business tower. Your main goal is to achieve what every chef wants, a five star restaurant. Each day, customers order off your customizable menu and you prep and cook their food by hitting the corresponding keys to each item, such as ‘L’ to add lettuce on a burger. This sounds relatively simple but can certainly become challenging when the clock is ticking and customers are getting impatient.

At the end of each day, you get a report of how you did. How many good/average/bad orders you did, how much you earned in tips and from orders, how many chores (such as washing dishes and taking out the trash) you did etc. This performance can have a negative or positive on what the game calls “daily buzz”. Buzz essentially controls how many customers will visit your restaurant, how patient they are and how much they’ll tip. Obviously, the higher your buzz, the better. Your buzz is affected by the food on your menu, as well as weather, time of day and equipment bought from the store. For example, foods such as fish or french fries are considered too smelly for mornings and will give you negative buzz during morning hours. However, fish is a high priced item and both fish and fries are quick and easy to prepare. For some players, this may outweigh the morning hours negative effects. While following the daily buzz is probably in the player’s best interest in terms of cash flow, you can still certainly ignore it and you would still be able to gradually upgrade your restaurant.

Aside from working in your restaurant, you can also complete challenges to earn some extra cash. Catering events which pit you against the clock to serve as many themed dishes as possible. In Iron Cook, a clever play on the Japanese game show Iron Chef, you must serve wave after wave of orders. The orders get more complex the more waves you complete and if you mess up three orders, you fail the challenge.
Somewhat similarly, in Hunger Festival, a play on Hunger Games, you must complete 20-30 orders but if you mess up even one order, you fail the challenge. While these challenges don’t add too much to the gameplay, they’re still a nice break from a day of service.

As you get further in the game, you start earning silver tickets which you can use to make “silver ticket bets”. The Silver Ticket Robot challenges you to get a certain number of perfect orders in a row with the menu items s/he specifies. This gives your menu a mix-up as well as adding a little challenge to your day.

Although gameplay doesn’t evolve much throughout the game and may become repetitive at times, there is certainly quite a few new recipes and equipment to buy while you improve your restaurant to be worthy of five stars and this can keep you playing for hours.

My wife, who enjoys casual games and especially cooking games, loves this game.

I hate all those things, and I also love this game.

It positively oozes with love and care from its developer. This is a great example of the kind of thing that indie developers can do that big companies never could. A game that uses the best casual game mechanics, but with hardcore difficulty, with an amazing variety of content, and without any crummy monetization ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. You can tell this is a labor of love, particularly considering the huge new expansion that adds tons of new modes including a co-op campaign, completely for free, over a year after its initial release.

Tip: Play this with a great big clicky keyboard. So fun.

I work at a cafe. I come home and play this. What the ♥♥♥♥ is wrong with me?

"Your food is just meh. I might come back, dunno"
SherriSoda Tower worker (♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ you!)

A great game, that gives you everything that it promises. It is casual, very grindy, very addictive and it is really funny. It is both simple and hardcore X) You start with 0 star restaurant and in couple hours you know every hobo that comes to drink beer to your place at 9 am. It is incredible funny to play with your family, sitting nearby, watching your poor restaurant management. To give names to all the visitors, to invent their biography, and to comment their choices like "Omg lady it's you again and you want more ice cream?! you already ordered 3 scoops of ice cream in the morning, you won't fool anyone here by changing your clothes".
So you work your way to 5 stars and posh ladies, ordering wine and lobster. Both music and art style are lovely, food is drawn yummy and appetizing, and it makes you want to cook it in real life. Side missions like dating, vip guests, robbery and hardcore catering\iron cook events gives you healthy dose of fun and competitive expirience.
I recommend it to people who admit existence of their inner child, who understand that it is just a very cute&casual simulator, who are curious enough to read all the spam letters and food description, and who will addictively push wrong buttons while cooking the most horrible soup in the universe.

"Hi, can I get a salad with bacon and croutons?"
"Of course sir, coming right up."
"Yo, two scoops of chocolate ice cream, stat"
"Yes sir, coming right up."
"Can I get a steak?"
"Yes ma'am, as soon as I've served these fine gentlem-"
"I'll have the nachos."
"One moment please sir-"
"Yo three scoops of ice cream with a cherry!"
"Sir please wait your t-"
"Boss you're needed in the toilet"
"Can't you see I'm busy with cust-"
"Where's my nachos?"
"DAMMIT SIR I CAN ONLY GO SO FAST!"

Before I can actually say anything about the game I have to say that Chubigans, the man responsible for this creation, is easily one of the coolest and nicest indie developers I have ever had to write to. And just on that aspect alone he deserves your money, but then he made this game and it's worth ever penny spent.

Some would say, "this game is casual." And to them I suggest they try multi-tasking a queue of 5 burger orders at once during rush time while still needing to flush a toilet, give a thumbs up on social media, and set a mouse trap while the health inspector is watching. That is twitch control so furious that even some pros couldn't take it. But somehow even with the game going as frentic as it does it's still fun just making food and taking all the orders.

Definitely one worth the money.

I spent $.99 on this game during a steam sale. I have played over 45 hours.

$.99/45 hours


=.$.022/hour


Less tahn 3 cents per hour of gamplay



10/10 It's just economic

Cook, Serve, Delicious! is a restaurant/cooking simulator where you start with a rundown little cafe and turn it into a five star restaurant all the while cooking numerous dishes, fending off robbers and flushing blocked toilets. While the game might not sound like everyone's cup of tea it combines addictive gameplay with a good progression system to make a fun gaming experience. As a huge fan of the Papa's Pizzeria games this was a must buy for me and I was not disappointed.

+Nice simplistic graphics, food and drink is well designed and the UI is nice to look at as well
+Incredibly addictive, simple gameplay that keeps you coming back for more
+You can take place in bets each day which require you to get a certain combo with certain foods
+You are rewarded for perfect orders and penalised for bad orders which helps push you to try as hard as you can
+Lots of different dishes including drinks
+Most dishes have upgrades which adds a new ingredient and new recipe cards
+All recipe cards have specific names
+Local co-op game mode
+The hotkeys for the different ingredients are for the most part intuitive, i.e. the first letter of the ingredient is the hotkey, and if you don't like them the hotkeys can be edited
+Full controller support for both the Xbox 360 Controller and the Dualshock 4 Controller
+Great music
+There are special events in the game which you can take part in such as catering events which earn you more money

-The frequency of work orders (flushing the toilet, cleaning the dishes, taking out the trash and setting rat traps) seemed a bit too high, in particular the flushing the toilet job seemed to be very frequent even when the toilet had been upgraded
-The progression on the star system is very slow and food upgrades are very expensive
-Once you start unlocking more order slots (you start with four and then it increases) it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of all of the orders you have on the go and I often pressed the wrong key and sent out an order early, breaking a combo
-I had a couple of issues where I lost saves and had to replay about 2 hours worth
-You can't upgrade the appearance of your restaurant apart from the automatic changes when you get a new star

Verdict:
7

A great restaurant/cooking sim that is perfect for fans of similar games but might be quite boring for most, best to pick this up on sale.

El K.