Restaurant City Tips and Game Guide

Restaurant City was the first major social game to put the player in charge of their own restaurant. The formula has since been copied by many other developers, most notably by Zynga in their successful game Cafe World. While the formula for most of the popular social games on Facebook is quite similar, Restaurant City breaks with some of the established conventions of these games. These design choices sets Restaurant City apart from the competition even though some of the approaches might make the game less appealing to some players.

The typical game experience in a social game is to create something of value, wait for it to be ready for sale and then make sure it is sold or served before it goes bad. Restaurant City does not work in this way, rather the game focuses on managing the employees in your restaurant and collecting ingredients for more and better dishes. Unlike most other comparable games, the items you place in your restaurant actually affect the gameplay and are not merely decorations.

The only way to make money in Restaurant City is to serve dishes to customers. You will never run out of ingredients or food to serve so customers will always be fed when they show up. The dishes are served by your employees. Humorously you can hire your friends to work in your cafe as either a chef, a waiter or most hilarious a janitor. While you will always have food to serve, you have to make sure that your employees are up to the task of serving it.

As they work, your employees lose energy until they are completely overworked and collapse on the floor begging for food or rest. In this state they are no good to your restaurant and they have to be rested or fed. Some players prefer to send their employees to bed and close shop by blocking the door to your restaurant. Using this technique your employees will always be rested and ready to work the next time you log on to the game. However, it is more efficient to just leave your employees working before you log of. Feed them some food so they are fully energized and let them run the store for a while.

There's a couple of reasons why this technique works better. First and most importantly, the money you lose by not letting your employees work out their full current shift is a lot more than what it costs to feed them all a sandwich the next time you log in. A sandwich costs 200 coins and restores the energy completely for your workers. By letting the crew work and just stuffing them with sandwiches each time you log on to Facebook you'll get a lot more mileage out of your staff. The second reason for keeping the restaurant open at all times is that whenever you level up, energy is automatically restored to all your employees. This means that if you level up while not playing, you'll get another full shift out of your staff. Especially at the lower levels this can be a huge advantage.

Since the only way you can make money is through serving food it's important to make your restaurant setup as efficient as possible. The less time it takes for one of your waiters to serve the food the faster you will make money. The customers are also extremely impatient, and any time they have to wait for more than a few seconds they become angry and leave. Losing you money and rating points.

The best set up in restaurant city is to keep all the tables as close as possible. Typically this means building a rectangle of tables and stoves where the servers work in the middle of the rectangle. You can either make one side of the rectangle be made up of all your stoves, or you can space out the stoves to be spread throughout the rectangle. This way no table is very far away from a server. As you gain more employees focus on balancing the number of waiters and chefs. If you have spare employees it's better to have more servers than chefs. Especially after you can add a drink machine is this important. Servers have to man the soda fountain as well as serving and cleaning up all the tables.

To aid your impossibly busy staff you can actually clear the tables yourself. As soon as a customer finishes his meal and pays, click on his empty plate before a waiter can get to it and it will be cleared. This will leave your waiters to serve more food and make more cash. Even better, there are trophies to be won for clearing a certain number of plates. In the same way you can remove trash from your restaurant by clicking on it. This will leave your janitor to focus on the toilets if you have any, or even let you work your janitor as an extra server if you wish. Of course, there are trophies for proficient trash pick up too.

As you reach higher levels you unlock parts of a vegetable patch behind your restaurant. Here you can buy seeds for 2000 coins and plant them. They require water every 9 hours and refuse to grow if they dry up. While a good idea, Restaurant City fails to make the most out of this feature. It could be a great way of getting hard to find ingredients, but since there's no way to know what vegetable will grow when you plant the seed, the feature is not very useful. Almost always your carefully nurtured plant will grow up to be something you have no use for.

Collecting ingredients is the driving game mechanic in Restaurant City. This feature is both satisfying and frustrating at the same time. Collecting ingredients adds an interesting aspect that keeps players coming back looking for the ingredients they need.

Ingredients can be collected in a few different ways. Every day there is a new food quiz in your mailbox. Answer a food related question correctly and get a random ingredient. If the question is too hard, just reload the page before the timer goes out and you 'll be able to take the quiz over with a different question. Also, every day go log on to Facebook and visit your restaurant you will be awarded a new ingredient. These ingredients are easy to get and free, but you have no control over what they will be so most often it will be stuff that goes straight in the storage cellar.

Outside your restaurant there is a produce cart where you can buy three ingredients. These ingredients change every day so you'll sometimes find what you are looking for there. The downside is that the ingredients from the produce cart are anything but free. Be prepared to shell out for the stuff you want. For an even steeper price you can actually buy any ingredient you want. This requires the use of Play Cash though, Play Cash is a virtual currency that's used in Playfish games. The only way to get Play Cash is to buy it for real money.

Finally, the best way to get ingredients is to trade with your friends. Visit your friends restaurants and check out their ingredients. If they have what you are looking for you can trade it with them right away of the items are unlocked. If your friend has locked a particular ingredient you have to send a request for a trade and your friend has to approve it before it goes through. All ingredients have a star rating. When trading ingredients you have to trade away an ingredient with the same or higher star rating than the item you are asking for. Finally, if all else fails you can post a request for ingredients to your profile. A call for help to your Facebook friends.

When you have collected the required ingredients you can learn to cook new dishes or upgrade the dishes you are already serving. Most dishes needs three ingredients to be made, but some need as many as five. One you have collected all ingredients needed for a dish you will get the option to either learn it if you have never made it before, or level the dish up if you already have created it. The higher the level the better looking the serving plate of the dish, but more importantly, the more gourmet points you make for serving it. Gourmet are used to determine the level of your restaurant so earning gourmet points is the ultimate goal of the game.

It is possible to serve several dishes at a time in Restaurant City. You can make starters, main dishes, deserts and even mix drinks. In each of these categories you can serve two or even three different dishes. Unless you are able to level up your dishes evenly it does not make sense to serve more than one dish in each category. If you have one level 5 dish and one level 2 dish half the customers will order the level 2 dish costing you a lot of gourmet points. It's better to just serve the higher ranked dish and work on leveling up your other dish if you still want to serve more than one dish.

Leveling up dishes requires ingredients that can be hard to find. To make the leveling process easier try to avoid serving dishes that need the same ingredients. For example, if you want to serve strawberry milkshake, you should try to avoid the cheesecake since both dishes needs strawberries. Ingredients are hard enough to come by as it is so you don't want your own dishes to compete for resources. Similarly, some dishes require a double dose of a certain ingredient. This dishes will typically be harder to level up than dishes that just need single ingredients. Naturally, the same is the case for dishes that need more than three ingredients.

These are some tips on how to play Restaurant City successfully. Focus on keeping your restaurant open and on collecting the right ingredients and this game will be a lot of fun.