The wisdom of those who have tried opening a restaurant informs you that this is not the easiest way to make money. If recipe for disaster is any indication, running a successful restaurant is a challenging, trial-and-error affair with plenty of stress and frustration, but one that, once mastered, offers excitement and satisfaction to balance it all out .
In this restaurant management sim, you’ll manage the staff, oversee your business, and make sure your lights stay on. Hiring the right people is essential to developing a balanced team composition and designing a functional and visually appealing restaurant, but this game goes even deeper with its management tools. I especially like how you can dig into the menu and even create your own recipes.
With its intuitive creation tool, Recipe for Disaster allows you to create your own delicious recipes. Using continuous columns, you can instruct your kitchen staff on how to prepare your latest dish. I like that this isn’t an easy step-by-step layout; Instead, you can run different tasks at the same time. Every ingredient or process you put into a recipe adds to the cooking time, meaning your cook will be dragged away longer and those devices unavailable to anyone. On several occasions I have become overly ambitious with my dishes; it caused my kitchen to fall behind on their orders and the restaurant collapsed as a result.
In fact, much of Recipe for Disaster works with a delicate balancing act that required me to weigh risks and rewards before opening the doors each day. Should I add a second grill to my kitchen for efficiency but start the day in debt? Would my dining room benefit from a few extra tables, or would that just inundate my kitchen staff with too many orders? Should I hire a great grill master with a bit of ego and risk him walking out or annoying the rest of the staff? I loved walking the razor blade in every election.
Of course, things failed several times due to overconfidence or misjudged risks. From an overly ambitious hiring plan to a poorly designed dining room, these instances are all frustrating as they can lead to game overs, but I appreciate how each failure has prompted me to learn lessons on how to manage different ones that occur concerns. These situations also make it possible to develop memorable emerging stories, like when a health inspector arrived just as my kitchen was on fire, or when a food critic walked in during rush hour while my entire workforce was about to quit.
Unfortunately, the built in stress of running a restaurant is amplified when sometimes staff isn’t doing anything when there’s work to be done, or when the simulation incorrectly says an area is inaccessible, preventing me from fully realizing my dream designs. On several occasions someone came to the building looking for a job only to never return after I hired them. Thankfully, these unintended difficulties are only minor inconveniences in the grand scheme of this restaurant sim.
The number of things that can go wrong on any given day is remarkable, but when you find the right balance, the resulting satisfaction as your promoted employees execute your perfect plan is startling. Watching my team effortlessly navigate a busload of people and a line out the door always made me smile, and by monitoring in-game notifications and countless counters, I was able to ensure my business was running like a well-oiled machine. While the main presentation is clean and streamlined, with icons that accurately and efficiently convey its meaning, the user interface is often overwhelming thanks to the sheer amount of information it needs to communicate.
Whether you’re playing the objective-based scenarios or the open-ended sandbox mode, I still can’t stop thinking about ways you can create a perfect dining room. Although the frustration of failure sometimes overwhelmed me, I often couldn’t wait to get back in front of Recipe for Disaster to play through several days of this immersive restaurant sim.
