Picking Up Steam: Cook, Serve, Delicious! (PC)

Cooking can be a delicate art, and when you’re the only person working a restaurant with orders coming in fast, you can’t exactly pull out the recipe card and carefully craft cuisine. If you don’t do each step in the right order, if you don’t use the right ingredients, if you fail to cook it long enough or let it cook too long, the meal can be ruined, and you certainly won’t get repeat customers if you serve them substandard meals. Cook, Serve, Delicious! is on one hand a complicated cooking game where it tries to map each step in making food to an action you need to perform but also a game where you’ll get a flood of orders that you need to keep up with, but while it can definitely become a hectic scramble that will test your time management and precision, much like a real chef, soon you’ll master it to the point you can be dishing out dishes with almost mechanical precision.

 

In Cook, Serve, Delicious!, the different foods you serve will have their ingredients mapped to the control method of your choice. While you can play with the mouse or a controller, the keyboard has some advantages both in the breadth of its available options, the speed with which a regular typer can hit the keys, and some helpful mnemonics you can form about your recipes. The orders you fill in Cook, Serve, Delicious! are all single item servings, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be easy to make. You start off with some simpler ones to easy you in, pressing K or M for ketchup and mustard on a corn dog for example, but as you get to more complex and importantly more profitable food items, you’ll soon be dealing with a lot more than two keys. Lasagna asks you to put four layers of ingredients in the right order repeatedly, swapping some out if the order is for one with veggies or meat. Pizza can have all sorts of topping and you can’t just pick off a wrong one if you throw it on there by mistake, customers expecting there to be no mistakes (although they are a touch kinder if it’s only a minor one). Fried Rice not only has a slew of ingredients to potentially throw in, but it cooks quickly, and if you have multiple foods all cooking at once, you have to make sure you don’t lose such an easily burned meal in the shuffle.

It can be very daunting at first when you start to acquire foods like soup. Most food has multiple recipe cards so the first thing you need to do is quickly eyeball what the customer wants. Thankfully there are no custom orders, but when you see the Soup de Jour requires bowtie noodles, bullion cubes, seasoning, three tomato slices, three carrot slices, and three celery slices, it might feel like your fingers can’t quite find everything quickly enough. While many foods try to have their ingredients mapped to common sense keys like serving vanilla ice cream scoops by pressing V or chocolate with C, bowtie noodles in that soup are mapped to W, but that’s because there are so many other ingredients that sometimes letters need to be kept free for something else that could reasonably use the first letter. Tomatoes are T for soup, but for another food you need to press O. Onions are sometimes O or N and butter can be B or Y depending, but there’s some method to the madness. While you can remap your keys to what you like if the defaults are not clicking, the game tries to keep the keys easy to remember and close enough together for reasonably speedy play. What’s more, that Soup de Jour recipe also is pretty easy to condense down into a mnemonic. Rather than thinking of it as the full recipe, you recognize it on sight and know the key combo is WUSTAY, with other similarly complicated soups easy enough to assign other quick names like KWSPAL and TAYLD. Not all of them are going to be so easy to say out loud, but in something that can start to mirror real life, you gradually become less reliant on reading that ingredient list and can more briskly perform all the required actions so you can quickly get the customer their order with little fuss.

 

The different foods in Cook, Serve, Delicious! aren’t all just about the right sequence of keys being pressed though. If you want to serve wine, you need to quickly select the right bottle then hammer the up key to open the bottle. This is technically easy, but if you swap to it quickly, you might press up a bit early, especially since there are chores you need to complete like throwing out trash and washing dishes that use those arrow keys and might condition you to be quick in pressing them. The chicken breast asks for exactly six hits with a tenderizing mallet so you need to keep count even when there are multiple other orders all needing to be seen to, and they will start to expire if you don’t get started on them quickly enough. Bananas foster must be watched while it’s cooked so you add ingredients at the right step and if something goes in the fryer you have to hold it down in there until its ready, meaning balancing the time you have and picking the right order for the orders is a crucial skill to develop. While remembering the different keys, inputs, and expected time investments sounds like a lot, you’ll only have a small menu size each day that you actually get to customize, so you can try to balance something more involved like burgers by having a quick and easy serve accompanying it like beer. More complicated and high class meals earn more though and draw in more customers, but if you need to ease in or learn something new, menu customization does give you that needed wiggle room until you’re ready for the more intense menu arrangements should you ever attempt them. Perhaps only the shish kabob stands out as going a little too far, the kabob asking you to arrange each food item on the stick so no two ingredients of the same type touch. This takes a lot more thought and practice to get right than other meals where the exact order isn’t so precise, but the game does at least recognize this and almost never asks you to take on that food item unless you’re up for the challenge.

 

Cook, Serve, Delicious! is actually the name of your restaurant in this game, it beginning as a humble establishment in the SherriSoda Tower. Workers at other businesses in the tower will drop in for a bite, the goal of the game being to work your way up to a five star restaurant by gradually improving your offerings, remaining consistent in quality, and clearing some special conditions like passing health inspections or competing in some special food contests. The Iron Cook and Hunger Festivities both ask for far more precise cooking with specific conditions, the game choosing the foods to serve and either allowing a few errors or none at all depending on which challenge it is. This is one place the game wisely avoids the shish kabob, but it isn’t afraid to throw in the more demanding foods that you will have hopefully learned from trying them out at the restaurant first. Some can be surprisingly easy if you have that know-how going in even if they’re meant to be a tough test of your skill, but keeping up with customers is already going to be a fairly frantic task that will hone your abilities as you earn star after star. There are other little challenges and events that crop up as well, emails sometimes letting you try simple challenges for some extra cash, although if you do have the unfortunate luck of having a criminal rob the place, the little minigame to properly recount his features for a police sketch is purposely obtuse and one of the roughest tasks you can be stuck with. It does give a decent payout though, making it similar to if you engage with Cook4Luv where potential date prospects will drop by for a bite and then you need to properly text them flirtatiously during your shift despite the other orders on the table.

While there are rewards for perfection and the buzz that determines how many customers show up suffers if you make mistakes, you can always keep pressing on and recover without fear of going out of business. However, the climb to the top can be a slow one despite how involved each work day will be. Each star rating requires a certain amount of days spent working regardless of whether or not you’ve met other conditions, and even if you do put the expensive items on the menu, it’s still a fairly gradual climb where getting new foods or upgrading the ones you have to more involved and valuable recipes takes a good while. There are periods where it feels like you are just getting back to work, not much changing between the days even if it does happen to be one where you’re doing a Crazy Dave bet or waiting for a date to show up. The menu system is partly to blame here. While there are elements like menu rot that ask you to rotate out items instead of just sticking with the easy familiar foods, it’s not too hard to still have a small stable of preferred foods, and some staple foods like salad can just remain on there indefinitely without penalty. Some new foods feel like they don’t really need to ever be used, so if the enchiladas don’t click, you can easily shove them aside unless they happen to come up in those competitions which are things you can tackle any time you wish so there isn’t too much pressure to perfect them. While most of Cook, Serve, Delicious! had come together well up until this point and still works very well for good stretches, there are some undeniably plain periods where you aren’t getting the money or upgrades needed for new and interesting complications or options.

 

The music in Cook, Serve, Delicious! is a nice accompaniment both during frenetic rush hours and the calmer morning and night periods when customers are more relaxed and slow to order. Fun relaxed salsa music or some bustling tunes map out a days highs and lows well and can add some extra dramatic energy to the competitions. There are actually modes outside of that push to become the best restaurant though. The Battle Kitchen can be played solo or with other players and have challenges where you have no control over what you’ll be cooking. There are themed challenges where you might need to handle a flurry of fried foods or Italian options as best you can and and endurance challenges where you d0 get to choose the new complications and items added as you try to survive but a mistake will mean your immediate end. Weirdly, you can also play the main game with one player taking orders and the other cooking, the player taking orders feeling like they get a much weaker experience, but it could be an intentional skew so someone who wants a less demanding role can join in. Alongside being able to unlock and play as characters from other indie games like Superhot, Shovel Knight, Blocks That Matter, and more, these Battle Kitchen additions all add a bit more to do even if they’re not star attractions, and perhaps a brief jaunt over into these modes can help alleviate some of the repetition found in the regular kitchen during those stretches you’re just waiting for enough money to do something more interesting.

THE VERDICT: Cook, Serve, Delicious! maps cooking to a clever control scheme, and once you come to understand its complex but rewarding system, tackling those frantic rush hours with professional precision can be incredibly satisfying. The game eases you in well and gives you a good bit of control over how complicated things are much of the time with its tougher structured challenges being things you tackle when you’re ready, but that climb can feel quite slow at times and it allows a bit of complacency with the menu being yours to customize. It is still overall an entertaining experience that adapts the idea of mastering recipes into video game form remarkably well on top of the delightful chaos of trying to please the impatient masses, but the less exciting lulls keep this from being a five star experience.

 

And so, I give Cook, Serve, Delicious! for PC…

A GOOD rating. An individual day in Cook, Serve, Delicious! can be an exciting rush, the juggling act of trying to manage many quick incoming orders asking for you to pay close attention, keep your fingers limber, and use your knowledge to strategically pick out what to do next all working surprisingly well despite the sometimes complicated elements. It is very much a game about honing your abilities and you feel that sting when you mess up an order because you added the item you flubbed to your menu, you had your chance to practice the orders, and you probably immediately knew what went wrong because you felt the disruption to a rhythm you built up over time. Those plain days where there isn’t much new to do are probably to help with building you up and giving you time to try new or upgraded foods, but the range of foods feels small and the incentive to diversify shrivels up a bit. The bets can push you out your comfort zone and you can retry a day so you won’t miss out on them if you do care, and the competitions do at least give a more structured direct challenge that can’t be wormed away from if you want to hit five stars. At the same time, besides eventually banning your restaurant from the easiest of easiest dishes like corn dogs, the slow climb will happen whether you stick to a comfort zone or do try to make a high buzz, high value menu arrangement. Thankfully, most food types do fit into the game’s system well so you can reach for harder challenges without it feeling too big of a stretch, even the kebabs something you can potentially make a mnemonic for if you want to practice that most difficult of foods for a while to get there.

 

Cook, Serve, Delicious! mostly just needs to find a way to avoid losing the thrills. Even on a regular work day you can still get that excitement of balancing rush hour, but a bit more novelty feels like the path to make this already entertaining and satisfying cooking system keep its luster so you want to make it all the way to five stars. I do imagine the reason I set it down many years ago with only 1 star on my restaurant was the slow climb caused by the trickle of income that makes new foods, useful upgrades, and the like a bit too gradual to earn, but with a bit more commitment to it this time around, there was definitely enough fast-paced cooking to make the job juggling exciting despite some of the repetition that set in.