General tip

The GOG version doesn’t come with a manual and the first mission isn’t very good at tutorialising. What the game does have is an extensive help descriptions system that might not be immediately obvious:

- The active window in the bottom right corner always has a question mark icon in its top left corner. Clicking it will toggle the window into help description mode. The descriptions are mostly relatively good, but sometimes it’s hard to find the exact item you should click on to bring up its related help info.

- The statistics screen has a glossary. Most of it isn’t very important, but the glossary entries for the different customer groups are – here you will find information about what they value, which style of furnishings they prefer, etc. Regularly checking these entries is actually important for running a high-satisfaction restaurant because customer preferences change throughout the game.

Below are some tips I’ve put together based on my gameplay and reading through the help descriptions (so you don’t have to):

#1 Restaurant menu creation
When you create a pizza you can save it. What the game doesn’t explicitly say is that a saved pizza actually becomes a “pizza configuration file” in the game folder and can be used throughout your later play sessions. It’s not tied to your save game state, so if you’ve e.g. stumbled on a very good recipe in an otherwise unsuccessful run of a mission and saved it, the saved pizza recipe will be available for import in every future play session.

You can save menu configurations the same way. This is handy since it lets you, for example, import the menu from the end of your last mission into your next one as a decent starting point.

If you want to delete a saved pizza or menu file, you can do it by deleting it from the game folder.

Also note that in every mission all your restaurants share one active pizza menu. You can only add one special pizza in each restaurant via that restaurant’s menu tab, but can’t take anything out of the menu without taking it out of circulation in the whole city.

#2 Restaurant area of influence mechanics
The green dotted circle or circles around your restaurants represent their areas of influence on the citizens – a hungry citizen in that area might go to your restaurant. The restaurant building itself has an area of influence (related to its level) and advertising provides either a larger area of extended influence around it or a separate area of influence connected to an adverting object (e.g. a billboard).

You can figure out what types of people visit your neighbourhood by clicking the different buildings in the area. Note that the schedule in the building window shows you when people are expected at the building. So if some yuppies are expected at the local office building starting at 6 AM, it might be wise to open before that so they can grab a very early breakfast before work.

Another consideration is the presence of tourist sites and subway station entrances. Station entrances usually have high mixed traffic throughout the day. Tourist sites are often away from other buildings but have one path leading to them and the best position for a restaurant to capitalize on them is to have the path starting point (not the tourist attraction itself) in its area of influence.

#3 Hidden restaurant expansion costs, i.e. why you need a warehouse
The game’s critical message system tells you that having a warehouse allows you to control the quality of ingredients and their price via choosing a supplier. What it doesn’t tell you: not having a warehouse assigned to a restaurant usually drastically increases the costs of that restaurant’s expansion.

Ingredients are sold to you not when your delivery boys fetch them, but when they’re actually used, i.e. leave your restaurant storeroom. Thus, you’ll see the money counter drop every time a cook starts preparing a pizza. When you expand a restaurant, all of its furnishings are sold and the storeroom is emptied. If you don’t have a warehouse, you’ll have to pay right then and there for all the ingredients that just left your storeroom with nowhere to go. If you do have one, restaurant supplies are just diverted back to it at no additional cost.

Note: the restaurant expansion tab shows only the cost of construction work for expanding the building, not later restaurant refurninshing or ingredient-related losses. You have to factor that in yourself.

#4 Ingredient decay mechanic
After delivery to your storeroom, ingredients start deteriorating in quality. Interestingly, you can safely sell pizzas made with 0% quality ingredients – your customers will be fine. The punishment for this is that the health inspector will decrease your restaurant’s influence range, if he finds expired ingredients when he visits. And you might not even know they’re expired, if you don’t notice the failed health inspection.

You have the option of throwing out ingredients below a certain quality level, at first only manually and then automiastocally via the restaurant manager panel. However, you can’t actually tell how much of your stock is expired and you will have to pay for it when you throw it out (see #3 above for an explanation why).

I’ve personally found it made the most sense to allow the ingredients to decay until the restaurant had the best refrigeration quality and I got a manager, then manually start throwing out old expired stock step by step until I reach a desired quality level, then set a policy for the manager somewhat below that level. That way the large cost of throwing out a lot of old stock hit me only once, in a controlled fashion.

#5 Staff training
When you decide to train an employee, a blue bar will appear in their stats. I initially thought it represented gradual imporvement, so I sent them off to training at the beginning of their shifts. Actually, that bar is a debuff – until it’s filled, the employee will work at only 50% of their efficiency. Therefore, it’s best to assign training at the end of their shift. That way they’ll still have a little left to finish when they come to work the next day, but most of their training will be accomplished outside of working hours (oddly enough).

Motivation boosts are different that skill training – they involve giving the employee a permanent raise and the effect is immediate, with no temporary debuff.

Health improvement works like skill improvement – while on sick leave the employee actually stays at work but only works at 50% of their usual performance –with one important difference: you can actually send an employee on sick leave and into skill training at the same time, but you have to select sick leave first and skill training second.

#6 Kitchen performance
Your kitchen can produce pizzas at different rates depending on how many cooks are working at once and how many ovens they have available, but this is not a 1:1 ratio.

Each oven has a performance stat representing how many pizzas can be baked in it and each cook has a performance stat representing how many he or she can bake individually. If the total oven performance score of a kitchen is higher than current cook performance, some oven capacity isn’t being used and you need to hire a new cook or train existing ones more to improve. If the current cook performance is higher than oven performance, the cooks can cook more but need an extra oven.

#7 Getting a gourmet star - the mechanics:
- The mayor inspects restaurants throughout the city – he goes from the town hall to a restaurant and back. The assessment for whether you earn a star or medal happens when he stands inside that restaurant. If you see him coming, you can still make last minute adjustments.

- For a gourmet star award he assesses how appealing the restaurant is to big shots. Your gourmet score is the average of the big shots opinion about your menu, furnishings and staff. Improving any of these aspects will improve your score and because it’s an average if two aspects are extremely satisfactory, the third one can be a little lackluster and you will still be okay.

- Note that the big shots opinions about furnishings change from mission to mission. In most cases they will like the superior style best but in my playthrough I had a case where they liked the cheap, simple style the most. You’ll find their current furnishing preferences via the glossary screen.

- You can in principle win stars completely honestly but you can also bribe the mayor to make the process substantially easier. Bribes accomplish two things: the mayor will visit your restaurant more often (giving you more chances to earn stars) and he will lower the required big shot satisfaction rating by a few points. The current required rating and the mayor’s mood can be checked at the town hall.

- If you do choose to bribe him, note that the effect of the bribes lasts only until midnight. If you want to keep him constantly happy, you’ll have to keep paying him large sums of money.