I once dropped $400 on parts to build a mechanical keyboard. A coworker was surprised when he found out how much I’ve spent. He asked why I wouldn’t get an office keyboard for a tenth of the price. Clearly he’s never beaten Cook, Serve, Delicious! on extreme difficulty or else he would know.

What he would know is the satisfaction of seeing an order for a Manhattan salad and instinctively typing “rcbomg” on the keyboard in a fluid motion or seeing an order for a classic Italian lasagna and typing “pscr” three times fast. Cook, Serve, Delicious! is about translating recipes into words into combinations of keystrokes, which is why I highly recommend playing with a quality mechanical keyboard.

Players likely won’t be able to translate every order they see as easily however. Mastering a language requires years of practice and this game doesn’t demand that level of dedication. Career mode can be finished in just 20 hours.

The main gameplay loop over those hours is relatively simple: Pick four to six menu items to serve before the start of the day. Cook through a calm morning shift, hectic lunch rush hour, calm afternoon shift, hectic dinner rush hour, and finally a calm night shift. Then repeat. One might think this is too simple to be enjoyable for 20 hours. But it’s not thanks in part to the tightness of the gameplay.

What do I mean by “tight gameplay”? I mean that when I get an order wrong, I know why that happened and I know that it was my fault. I mean when I press a button, the resulting sound effects are extremely crisp. Wine bottle corks pop, meat tenderizers thump, and potatoes dropping into soup bloops. Cause and effect is crisp and instantaneous. Cook, Serve, Delicious! is challenging, but I always feel engaged and determined rather than frustrated.

Speaking of challenge, the difficulty curve, derived from the buying of recipe upgrades and new foods to serve, is very well tuned. As players purchase more of these, they will have to remember more and more mappings from ingredient to button. Eventually there will be collisions.

For example, when soup is first bought, there are two ingredients that start with “B”: bowtie noodles and bouillon cubes. By the time they’re done acquiring recipe cards, players better have bowtie noodles wired to W, bullion cubes to U, bacon to B, beans to E, and broccoli to R to get orders out pronto.

As newer dishes are acquired, they tend to be more complicated. One of the first dishes available is the pretzel which requires at most one of two possible toppings. In contrast, shish kabobs, one of the last accessible dishes, requires eight units of food and there are 10 ingredients to choose from. However, two food units of the same ingredient cannot be adjacent to one another. This adds another dimension of consideration for the cook. It’s not enough to get the combination right, but the permutation as well.

On top of all of this, players will have to work with haste because they’ve got to juggle up to eight tasks at a time. They’ll find themselves glancing at the grill, checking which burger patty is in danger of charring or which customer is about to storm off all while preparing a perfect plate of pasta. They’ll rush to perfectly platter eight pieces of sushi lest they piss off a patron so that they can rush to the sink to scrub dirty dishes lest they strike out against the health inspector. Cook, Serve, Delicious! concots chaotic situations with consistency.

In conclusion, this game is like a big salad. It’s relatively light, but not too light like a standard salad. Standard salads are more akin to the restaurant sims one might find on Miniclip. Anyway, most folks would prefer something with more meat. But, I actually like salad. And I liked this game enough to play it for 50 hours.

4/7

Credits