Irasshaimase!

Y’know, ever since I was a kid I dreamed of owning a restaurant. Burgers or Sushi, any type would be fun. What could be better than feeding folks and soaking up the adoration of a satisfied room full of diners? As I grew up, it was pretty clear that running a restaurant required a lot of intestinal fortitude, willingness to take risks and a lot of luck. So, even though I’m pretty far from that idle childhood daydream, there is still a way to capture what it’s like to run a little eatery in “Cook, Serve, Delicious!”

Released in 2012, this is one of the few games I regularly play on my 1st gen Kindle Fire (the older machine it doesn’t play nice with Ash Vacuum). Giantbomb had a great playthrough of the first half an hour of the game, and does a good job of showing off what the gameplay loop is like. Everyday you open the restaurant and assemble food for the customers that come in.

Each meal requires a different kind of prep, with varying levels of complexity. Since you choose what to have on the menu between days, you often have to choose between cheap, easy-to-make eats and more difficult foods that have a better profit margin. Though most times of the day have a slow but steady trickle of customers coming in, lunch and dinnertime are hectic affairs where you will fight hard to get everyone’s food served (and assembled to their specifications). Each day passes pretty quickly, so I had a fair share of “just one more day, just one more day” eating up hours with the tablet.

You buy new meals and upgrade the ones you have with new ingredients, while saving towards more expensive kitchen tools and machines that will help you with dishwashing, and keeping customers happy. This means that there are a lot of things to customize and there is a constant sense of progression. When you upgrade your tiny cafe into a larger eatery, it also brings more complexity and customers to serve, so there’s always some new food or challenge to learn.

The game runs well on my old Kindle Fire, and even for a game that relies on precision selection of ingredients, the touchscreen works well. I’m curious to try the controller-enabled PC version.

I don’t quite know if this is accurate to running a restaurant, but it certainly is a lot of fun.

Recommended: Yes