Cook, Serve, Delicious! is one of the more mechanically complex of the extant games in the time management sim genre. The premise is pretty simple: you are the new owner of the run-down in-house restaurant in an office tower, and must make your eatery a success by serving customers delicious food cooked to perfection. First you must purchase foods and build an appealing menu which balances different types of foods with different attributes to generate positive 'buzz' which will attract diners. As each day rolls by, customers will order food which you must prepare by following a set of instructions on the keyboard and/or mouse. Time flies by at a furious clip, customers crowd in during the lunch and dinner rushes, and you must deftly fill orders with perfect precision before your customers leave, angry at the wait, while juggling various chores to keep the restaurant clean and sanitary. There are a few other bells and whistles -- betting, cooking challenges, health inspections -- but that's the heart of it. Pretty standard stuff, although the menu design aspect and the wide variety of foods and recipes make for a particularly challenging experience.
What struck me as I played this game is the way that, like most of its genre, it abstracts away certain aspects of the process of owning and running a restaurant to focus on ... perhaps not the most fun parts of the job. I'm not sure most restaurant owners are particularly enamored of frantic rush hours or struggling to pass health inspections. But these games are trying to provide a certain experience which would be bogged down by such somewhat boring details as budgeting and crunching accounts, which themselves are primarily or exclusively the province of completely different game genres. So in Cook, Serve, Delicious! there are literally no costs to pay in running the restaurant. You must make one-time payments to get menu items and time-saving or traffic-enhancing equipment, but once you've paid for your recipe you receive "a surplus" of ingredients -- enough to last you literally forever. No need to calculate the production cost and profit margin of each item, keep enough ingredients in stock or account for spoilage, no rent to pay or even any need to take home money for your own subsistence; every order you fill is basically pure profit. If you fulfill the goals necessary to raise your star rating, the owners of the tower will even remodel your restaurant for free! No need to take on debt in a gamble to increase your customer appeal.
I certainly understand, from a game design perspective, why this choice was made. People who are playing a time management sim don't necessarily want to manage a bunch of spreadsheets or dick around with the prices and inventory of their food; they just want to challenge themselves to quickly complete tasks and actively manage incoming information. But what I find fascinating is the picture that this presents of entrepreneurship. The implication is that success as a small business owner is simply a matter of plugging away, doing your job and providing the best service you can, and watching the cash roll in. Occasionally you might need to make a major purchase, but going into the red and eventually going bankrupt is just not an option. As long as you keep your head down and satisfy your customers, things will go great. In reality, 9 out of 10 small businesses fail, and not necessarily due to poor customer service; sometimes you just can't compete in a saturated market or against established players with more resources, economies of scale, and political connections on their side. And the restaurant business is particularly harsh and unforgiving; profit margins are razor thin and competition is a shark tank. One of the core assumptions of capitalism is that business owners, especially small business or startup owners, are entitled to the profits of their enterprise because they take risks. A worker is selling a commodity, their labour, and gets a day's pay for a day's work; entrepreneurs are risking their capital assets on an uncertain venture which may fail and take all of their money with it. No risk, no reward. In Cook, Serve, Delicious! there's no possibility of failure, only pure upside, and this kind of serves as a propagandistic message that in capitalist enterprise, everyone wins. Just work hard, provide excellent customer service, and obey the whims of government in the form of the health inspector, and you too can build your shabby little cafeteria into a five-star restaurant and become a celebrity chef who competes on the Iron Cook show. A little elbow grease is all it takes. The waste of resources and ruined lives represented by the constant failure of risky businesses does not exist.
Of course there is one more element of the game that I have not yet mentioned: the Buzz. This mechanic could be said to represent something of the risky nature of running a successful restaurant. Like a real business, your cafeteria lives and dies on word of mouth. Every day you get a buzz factor, which is affected by active and balanced menu management and by the ratio of perfect orders to angry customers during the previous day. More buzz, more customers through the door; bad service and bad food, less traffic, right? But as I played the game up to the two-star level, as my buzz grew and grew through the effects of my own pretty good play, I didn't really see much difference. If buzz had an effect, it was subtle. So I decided to experiment and try to break the game. I tanked my buzz through poor menu design, filling my menu with fatty foods and letting stale items rot, and by deliberately screwing up every order and leaving cleaning tasks unfinished. It worked; it only took one bad day to go down to 0% buzz, and I easily kept it there the next day. I was expecting that my customer throughput would nosedive, but that I would still maintain a trickle of business to get me back on my feet. But the poor reviews didn't seem to have any effect on my traffic at all. The rush hours were still crazy busy, and even in between rushes, I still got the steady drip of orders coming in. External sources claim that buzz does make a difference, but if so, it wasn't one I was capable of detecting. The difference between 50% buzz and 0% was absolutely negligible. Not only is it impossible to fail; it's impossible to even feel like you're failing.
One final, somewhat incidental comment: because of the launch of the sequel, Cook, Serve, Delicious 2!!, the daily challenges in the game's Battle Kitchen mode have stopped coming; as is often the case when a new product hits video game storefronts, content updates for the old game have gone the way of your restaurant in the plotline of the new game. According to Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!!'s store description, your original restaurant went under because the owners of the office tower it occupied were embezzling funds. So there is at least one thing that can make a business in the Cook, Serve, Delicious! extended universe fail: economic forces completely beyond your control.
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