Tiny Chef Tips and Tricks

Tiny Chef is a free iPhone app brought to you by Brooklyn Packet Co. It's a fun entrepreneurial game with the focus on opening your own restaurants and play style is similar to the familiar Facebook games Café World and Restaurant City. Tiny Chef will bring you hours of enjoyment, especially if you know how to navigate the potential pitfalls which can make any game like this where the main object is to level up frustrating. Following are some Tiny Chef tips and tricks that will make things easier for the beginner or the novice player alike.

Tiny Chef Tips and Tricks #1: Getting Free Chef Bucks

Like other games of its kind, Tiny Chef has two kinds of currency-coins which you earn by performing tasks in the game, and "Chef Bucks," which you need to buy premium items or speed up actions. You get a single Chef Buck every time you level up, but one Chef Buck isn't enough to do much of anything in the game. Fortunately, Tiny Chef gives you lots of options for earning free currency by downloading other apps. Note that you have to open the app to receive them, but once it's been opened and the Chef Bucks have been credited, you can delete it. These offers change constantly so it's worth checking at least once a day to see if there's something new.

Tiny Chef Tips and Tricks #2: Getting More Chef Bucks for Your Money

There are going to be times when you will be very, very tempted to buy Chef Bucks to complete some task in the game or purchase a premium decorative item or premium recipe. The prices for Chef Bucks range from $0.99 for 20 to $99.99 for 2400. Unless you have money to burn, we don't recommend doing this regularly, but if you intend to purchase currency, check the app store first to see if you can find a better deal. For example, as of this writing, the game is offering 26 Chef Bucks for downloading a game called Archer's Quest. This app only costs $0.99, so it's a better deal than buying Chef Bucks directly because you get a few more plus another app for the same price.

Tiny Chef Tips and Tricks #3: Maximizing Your Earnings in Game by Choosing the Right Recipes

How quickly you earn money in Tiny Chef depends on choosing the right recipes. Each recipe has a cost in coins involved (except for the very first recipe you'll cook, 10 servings of spaghetti and meatballs which take 30 seconds to complete), as well as an amount of time required to cook them. The difficult part of this is that a recipe spoils if it's not served within 60 minutes, no matter how long it took you to cook, so you lose the money you spent and end up with nothing, unless you use Chef Bucks to "reinstate" it.

There are two places to get recipes from in Tiny Chef: cookbooks (some are permanent and some are limited -edition holiday themes), and the "Academy," which offers lessons on a limited edition basis. To "learn" a recipe from the Academy, you must complete it a specified number of times and then it gets transferred to your permanent collection of cookbooks. Completing recipes from your cookbooks a certain number of times will also get you stars, which will unlock additional recipes up to a point.

Tiny Chef Hints #4: Recipes Which Offer the Best Return On Investment

This fact surprises many Tiny Chef players, but the very best recipe for return on time and money is the first recipe you will make starting out, Spaghetti and Meatballs. It costs zero coins to make, takes 30 seconds to complete, and while you will have to keep cooking it over and over again in order to make sufficient quantities to last, in return for this you will get 20 coins per minute and 20 experience points per minute (experience points enable you to level up, which gives you more options such as buying additional ovens and waiters to make your restaurant run more smoothly). We'll discuss Spaghetti and Meatballs again later in this article because it can be used creatively to avoid getting popularity penalties for running out of food, but keep in mind that any time you have a few minutes to "cook" in the game, adding a few dishes of Spaghetti and Meatballs to your oven will improve your performance.

The other dishes which offer high returns on investment are:

Hot Dogs: These cost 5 coins to cook 50 servings in 5 minutes. This gives you 9 coins per minute profit and 10 experience points per minute.

Eggs Benedict: These cost 25 coins to cook 25 servings in 5 minutes. This gives you 5 coins per minute profit and 10 experience points per minute.

Broccoli Soup: These cost 10 coins to cook 60 servings in 15 minutes. This gives you 3.33 coins per minute profit and 4 experience points per minute.

Caesar Salad: These cost 165 coins to cook 95 servings in 30 minutes. This gives you 4 coins per minute profit and 9.5 experience points per minute.

Spaghetti and Meatballs, Hot Dogs, and Broccoli Soup are all from the first cookbook you get with the game, Kitchen Basics Cookbook. Eggs Benedict are from the second cookbook you achieve from leveling up, called Family Favorites, and Caesar Salad comes along in the Delicious Dishes Cookbook, which is the third cookbook you'll earn.

Tiny Chef Hints #5: Longer-Term Meals with Better Return on Investments

The recipes in Hint #4 will give you the greatest return on your investment, but you're not always going to be able to check on your dishes every half an hour, and spoiling dishes is the worst thing you can do. For those times when you need to leave the game alone to do its thing, following are some longer-term recipes that have decent returns for various time limits:

1 Hour: Hamburger, found in the Kitchen Basics Cookbook. Offers 1.75 coins per minute and 2.17 experience points per minute.

3 Hours: BBQ Ribs, found in the Delicious Dishes Cookbook. 2.64 coins per minute and 4.58 experience points per minute.

6 Hours: Falafel Pita, found in the Delicious Dishes Cookbook. 2.58 coins per minute and 3.54 experience points per minute.

8 Hours: Classic Steak, found in the Delicious Dishes Cookbook. 2.34 coins per minute and 3.28 experience points per minute.

The recipes which take longer than 8 hours to cook are poor returns on investment, with an average of 1 coin per minute and 1 experience point per minute, so they are to be avoided unless you know you're not going to be able to check your dishes for long periods of time.

Finally keep in mind that the recipe with the worst investment in time and money out of the standard cookbooks is Lobster, in the Kitchen Basics Cookbook, which ties up one of your ovens for 96 hours with a ROI of only .93 coins per minute and 1.26 experience points per minute! Unless you're a completist who feels you have to master every recipe in the game, the slow-cooking recipes in Tiny Chef are best avoided.