In Chef Life: A Restaurant Simulatoryou will have to make increasingly complex recipes, serve your customers on time, manage stocks, choose how to present your dishes on the plate: in short, you are the head of your own restaurant!
Have you always dreamed of opening and running your own restaurant? The management game Chef Life: A Restaurant Simulator — from the French studio Cyanide — is perfect for imagining yourself as a starred chef. It has been available since February 23, 2023 on PC, PS5 and PS4, Xbox One and Xbox Series S/X, Nintendo Switch.
If this type of games can often be disappointing by limiting the possibilities, this is not the case with Chief Life : it’s like being at the head of a restaurant, with the pleasures that go with it, but also, beware, the galleys.
Meals prepared with care
To start, the game will teach you the basics of cooking gameplay with one of the most basic dishes: a steak and fries. Then, little by little, new recipes will be added to your menu when you have learned them. Concretely, for each dish, you must open the recipe book and select the one to be made. At the top of your screen will then be displayed the ingredients you will need and the different steps.
You have to go get the ingredients first, then follow each step. Take the example of the famous steak frites. First you need to prepare the meat by cutting it – via a QTE system. For fries, we get the potatoes, we cut them, then we go to frying. Then it’s cooking the meat. It is necessary to recover the good frying pan (wash it between each use!), heat the plate, then sear the meat (so wait until the plate is hot, otherwise it will not be considered fully successful). The seasoning, then: be careful not to add too much salt or too much pepper. Fortunately, for this, you can use the “chef’s instinct” function to feel if the dish is salty enough or not.
Once all the main elements are ready, you have to serve, and therefore prepare the plate. This is quite an “exciting” aspect of this management game, because you can totally customize the way your dish is presented. There are 3-4 different ways to cut your fries and portion them, the same goes for the meat and sauce, the style of the plate, and lots of other small presentation elements.
If for a steak and fries the process seems very simple, make no mistake: the more complex dishes gradually require very good organization and a certain amount of time management – all the more so, because your customers are waiting for their dish within a certain time. You lose points if your meat or fish is undercooked or poorly seasoned, and what’s more, some customers will have specific requirements (a little more cooked meat, for example).
Where one would expect a relatively quiet game, Chef Life: A Restaurant Simulator don’t hesitate to put some pressure on us in the kitchen. Finally, this is what is also expected for the simulation of a restaurant.
The little galleys of the life of a chef
It is not exclusively a cooking game: the management of the restaurant as a whole is incorporated. Thus, it is about ordering food from suppliers. You will also have to choose the standard of your establishment. If you opt for organic and local products, for example, it will cost you more and will have an impact on the image of your restaurant – as well as the menu you choose to promote.
It will also be necessary to take care to calculate the number of ingredients that you take out of the reserves, and in particular of the freezers, because the expiry date is integrated into the gameplay. Beware of waste, which is costly! Inventory management is clearly not the most pleasant part of the game. It can even be slightly annoying at times. But, fortunately it is there: integrating these small galleys contributes to a certain form of realism.
And just like The Sims, you can also customize locations. Furniture, decoration, colors are all elements on which you can influence. That said, we still regret that the choices remain so limited at the start of the game, where we would like to make this restaurant more ours from the start.
If you like cooking and taking care of your dishes, which you sometimes imagine yourself at the head of a restaurant, you will undoubtedly appreciate Chef Life: A Restaurant Simulator.
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