Ever think of opening your own cafe or restaurant, serving up your favourite dishes and creating a unique dining experience through your restaurant’s exterior and interior – anything you fancy from a classic western design to an oriental look? Wait no further! Recently, Playfish released a Facebook game titled Restaurant City which allows you to do all of that and more.
In Restaurant City, you own the restaurant of your dreams. With a few clicks of the mouse button, you’ll be able to customize the interior of your restaurant with different tables, chairs, stoves and even add arcade machines and toilets. For the exterior, you can change it to your liking with plant decorations and signboards. With such a huge amount of choices, you’ll be able to go crazy and change your restaurant’s layout as often as you please without getting bored.
You’ll be able to customize the food menu with Restaurant City allowing you to choose what type of starter, main and dessert you would like to serve. However, the downside is that you must possess the needed ingredients to learn the food. Each food item has a maximum level of 10 and allows users to gain gourmet points. These gourmet points determines your player level in the game. With the increment of each level, users get different rewards each level, ranging from expansion of restaurant size to an increase in staff numbers.
Staff in your restaurant are recruited from your Facebook friends. They help run the restaurant with three possible roles for them: Cooks, waiters and cleaners (only needed when you’re at level 8). Each role has a unique part to play in the restaurant, so you must plan how to utilize your staff correctly. Each staff member has a “happiness” bar which determines the speed of how they work – as the bar depletes, staff members slows down. Once the bar reaches 0%, staff members just lie on the floor and refuse to work. To increase their “happiness”, you can feed them with food items (which needs the in-game currency, gold coins) or to rest them (which requires a long time).
At the start of the game, you’re given ingredients for every new restaurant you visit. In addition, you can earn more ingredients if you are able to get the right answers on the daily ingredient quiz, available when you log into the game. As the amount of food ingredients is limited, it is advisable for you to trade with friends in order to gain items to level up your food menu.
Customers to your restaurant will give positive and negative reviews of your restaurant. For every positive feedback from customers, you’ll gain a 0.1 increment in popularity. However, you’ll get negative feedback if customers were not able to find a seat or table, slow serving off food or table not being cleared. A way to help with this would be to install arcade machines for 8000 gold coins, but it cost rather high and is only obtainable mid-game. Advanced players will realize that a cheaper alternative would be to “maze” the place and place “waiting” chairs with no tables.
For similar pro-tips and a quicker way to level up, follow the guides available on Playfish forums which will show you how to build an effective layout to serve customers fast. Also, do take note that the quality of your restaurant furnitures do not play a role in leveling up. It’s best to stick to the cheapest gear and save up to customize your dream restaurant in the future.
One downside of this game: In order to gain gourmet points or level, you have to leave the game on. If you close the game or your Internet browser, you’ll be only able to earn gold coins.
Restaurant City can be played on Facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=43016202276 (Requires a Facebook account)
Have your say. Add your comments: