It’s a little known fact that I wanted to be a chef while growing up. When the Food Network first came to Canada, they had all these shows I loved. There was Good Eats and Iron Chef and especially Emeril Live. Then Food Network Canada launched and they replaced that with the charismatic black hole that was Christine Cushing and I stopped wanting to be a chef.

So I came into Cook, Serve, Delicious! hoping for something a bit more Iron Chef rather than a casual experience. You know, more El Bulli than Taco Bell. Fortunately, despite the fact that CSD is a mobile port, it’s still a hardcore experience.

In Cook, Serve, Delicious! you play as the chef of a brand new restaurant called, conveniently, Cook, Serve, Delicious. Your task is to bring your little restaurant in an office building from a run down zero star diner to a platinum star restaurant (the three star rating is the intellectual property of Michelin).

To do so, you must complete a number of tasks to qualify for the next star level. These task typically include completing a specified number of cooking days, purchasing foods for your menu, buying equipment for your restaurant and achieving a certain level of success in preparing meals for customers.

And to cook for customers isn’t the casual experience I was expecting. Rather than setting a menu and hitting go or a simple click or two for each order, CSD makes you work to put meals up on the pass for service. Each order requires you to do some cooking to order. You might have to put that piece of meat on the grill and not under or overcook it. You’ll have to dress orders, such as salads and burgers, to the customer’s orders. All the while, you’re juggling a seemingly endless stream of orders and chores around your restaurant without annoying customers or letting your restaurant turn into a dump.

It may look like a casual cooking experience and the fact that it’s a mobile port may make think it’s a casual restaurant game but the amount of multi-tasking and time management required was simply staggering. During the lunch and dinner rush, you go non-stop through orders. You either take your time to get orders right but inevitably anger customers who aren’t being served to the point where they leave in a huff or go full speed and risk screwing up orders which causes customers to leave angry.

In addition to the actual work of cooking and operating the restaurant, there’s some upfront management to do. You have to set the menu each day. Certain items will get “rot” in that people will tire of them if you don’t cycle them out. Too many fried foods and snacky items are bad for business too. These affect your restaurant’s buzz which determines the number of customers coming in through the door. How good you are at filling orders without screwing up also affects that buzz. Balancing easy and fast to cook items with keeping your buzz up is another little challenge the game throws at you.

However, it’s the actual restaurant management sim portion of the game that seems to have been short-changed. You earn money for serving customers but money doesn’t seem to do much apart from buying new food and equipment. I don’t think you can actually fail in this game. Not making money just means that you progress more slowly than you otherwise would if you had a higher turnover.

And it’s not like this game moves quickly. Sure, service flies by as you frantically push buttons to add toppings and do chores (I think my APM is higher playing Cook, Serve, Delicious than laddering in StarCraft II [yes, I am awful at SC2]) but levelling up is a painful grind. Having to go through 20 days of service to get to the next star level feels like a long time. Each star level adds another prep station to your kitchen so slowly that the difficulty curve seems pretty gentle. That doesn’t help the perception that this is a casual game.

The graphics are cartoony and colourful which work well enough but don’t help that whole mobile casual game port perception. I’m not saying that they’re bad. I quite like the art design but can see how it would influence perception of it. I’m also fairly certain that there are no more than a dozen customer character models in the game. When you serve over 30 customers a day and play a few days in a row, you tend to notice these things. The music isn’t particularly memorable. The sound effects are a bit generic but they are serviceable in that you can immediately identify what’s happening based on sound queues.

Fortunately, one area that Vertigo Gaming focused on was controls. No expense was spared in converting the touch controls of the mobile game to the PC port. You can use mouse and keyboard controls interchangeably and all of the keyboard controls are rebindable. The controls are responsive which is a necessity given how frantic the action can get.

Conclusion

You know, I came into Cook, Serve, Delicious! expecting a very casual mobile experience. I guess this is what I get for stereotyping a mobile port. I wouldn’t go so far to call this a “hardcore restaurant sim” as Vertigo is wont to refer to it as.

Cook, Serve, Delicious won’t serve as an interactive cookbook and training tool. I would say that this is the most fun and addicting cooking game that I’ve played. I may not have sold it that well in the above review but the adrenaline rush from firing off orders like there’s no tomorrow just can’t be beat. I really should buy this for Android too.

Rating: 8.0/10

Cook, Serve, Delicious! was reviewed on Windows PC but is also available on Mac OS X, Linux, iOS and Android devices. Your impressions of the game may differ depending on whether you played the mobile or PC version, your PC specs and whether you held any youthful aspirations of being a chef.