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 Intro video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lg8g9vB9BMA Restaurant Empire is a 2003 restaurant sim game for the PC developed by Enlight Software. Enlight made a sequel in 2009 which included both the original Restaurant Empire as well as a new campaign following the story of Restaurant Empire 1. I will be playing the original game as included in Restaurant Empire 2. Why would you play this game? Restaurant Empire is kind of an obscure game. I've never met anyone else who has played this game, and Restaurant Empire 2 currently has a "Mixed" rating on Steam, which would normally suggest that the game is garbage. However, I really like the game, and I think it has a lot of charm. It's got a weird plot, incredibly ugly restaurants and all your customers are assholes who want you to pay them $20,000 so they can reveal the secret of adding cinnamon to your pork casserole. Can I help run this restaurant into the ground? Yes, you can! For one, I'll need the thread's help putting together the menu and deciding on the decor for our restaurant, Treize à Table, as well as any other restaurants we acquire throughout the game. Note that some recipes are really bad in gameplay terms, either because they take a long time to prepare or they have really slim (or even negative) profit margins. In the spirit of being a terrible amateur restauranteur, I'll put those recipes on the menu if you really want me to, but I may have to temporarily remove them if they are making it really difficult for me to finish a mission! Update list Episode 1: Treize à Table Interlude: Let's talk about good and bad recipes Episode 2: I need a mortgage to buy this cookbook Episode 3: Welcome to Friday Night Supper Slam Episode 4: A family restaurant Episode 5: My account password is "password" Episode 6: No items, Final Destination, soups only Episode 7: No guilt in victory Episode 8: The secret of the French spaghetti Episode 9: But everyone calls me... Episode 10: Nah, that's too obvious, how about "Hardy Johnson"? Episode 11: The power of the soul Episode 12: My, my! At Waterloo, Napoleon did surrender Episode 13: There is no spoon Episode 14: No, strip mine our customers HARDER Episode 15: A restaurant for a king Episode 16: Imagine a boot stamping on a floppy chef's hat forever Episode 17: Fuckin' microwaves. How do they work? Episode 18: The stuffing to end all stuffing Current recipe list https://lpix.org/sslptest/index.php?id=151701 Art  drat IM HUNGRY's portrait of Armand.  Aesculus' gif of Armand's sweet moves.  Nondevor's more accurate representation of our recipe for Crepes Marcie  habeasdorkus' fabulous sign for our ristorante La Cosa Nostra  MaxieSatan's cooking tips  lofi's awesome rebranding of the Gentille Alouette  Zagglezig's kickass logo for the Funky Elvis Enchanted Hat fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Aug 18, 2018 |
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Jul 2, 2018 21:49
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Episode 1: Treize à Table The game kicks off with our protagonist, Armand Leboeuf, visiting his uncle, Michel. Despite not having a restaurant yet, Armand apparently always walks around in a full goofy French chef costume.  Armand! Welcome back! Mon Dieu, it's been such a long time! Great to see you, uncle! Indeed, it's been over four years! How've you been uncle? Fine, fine. Good to see you again! How's your restaurant doing? What, Treize à Table? Oh, I closed the restaurant down a few months after you left. YOU closed down Treize à Table? Why, uncle? I did not want to be absorbed by OmniFood. The clients were dwindling. I needed to close it down! And how much did you sell the restaurant for? Sell the family relic? No way! I still own the restaurant – it's just not operating. So what are you going to DO with the restaurant? I… don't know. I've been thinking, and will NOT sell it. But it's really not doing anything productive anyways… Hey, I've got an idea! Why don't you let ME run the restaurant! As I've graduated with honors, I'm more than apt for the task! I don't know, Armand. I trust you'll do your best but I don't see how, with your inexperience, you won't be absorbed by OmniFood. Most of my friends have gone that path, with much more experience than you in the business. But, if you manage to get Treize à Table up and running again, and get so much as a trickle of revenue, I might reconsider. You mean – you'll give me the restaurant if I get it up and running? Sure! Good, then! Off you go!UNCLE MICHEL HANDS OVER THE KEYS TO HIS RESTAURANT, TREIZE À TABLE! Now get Treize à Table back in shape, and make me proud! One big problem with Restaurant Empire was that it had a really obnoxious, unskippable tutorial at the beginning. In Restaurant Empire 2, they fortunately let you skip it. Anyway, this is our restaurant, Treize à Table! It's not a very nice restaurant, and it has all of six tables. It's no wonder Michel couldn't get this dump profitable! That's where I'll need your help. First, though, the game makes you go back to Michel's house for some more exposition/tutorial. I see you know your way around. Armand, now I am going to explain about setting up your menu with tasty recipes. Are you ready? As ready as I'll ever be! Good! Let's get going then, shall we? But uncle, tell me: what happened in these four years? Nothing much. I'm just relaxing and learning to enjoy life. I've been too long in the restaurant business… You know, Armand, I'm just too tired to put up with more monopolistic bullying by those OmniFood guys… OmniFood? This is the food supply giant, right? What are they doing in the restaurant business? A little less than four years ago, OmniFood realized that they had the best ingredients in the world. They were supplying the greatest restaurants. Well, what they did was nothing short of remarkable. So what'd they do? They started charging a fortune to the restaurants, and at the same time started opening their own restaurants, with top ingredients. They wooed eminent chefs away from restaurants… …and bought out other restaurants. In short time, they have cornered the fine dining market. Are there a lot of OmniFood restaurants in town? Are you kidding? The latest figures from The F&B Times have their market share at 68%. I'd say that they are practically monopolizing the industry! That's a large piece of the pie! They're almost a food and beverage monopoly! Yes, and needless to say, most of the good cooking friends have abandoned the industry. They simply could not compete against the likes of OmniFood. Thanks for sharing that with me, uncle… Anytime, my favorite nephew! Sure, uncle! Show me how to entice customers with a well-planned menu!So, apparently Restaurant Empire takes place in the Demolition Man universe where in four years all restaurants have become  Good going! You're really picking up the pace here. I have one last thing to show you before you are really prepared to take on the duties of a Restauranteur, and that would be employing staff. Uncle, can I ask you some questions? Sure, Armand. Tell me what's on your mind… What are OmniFood's restaurants like? Do they serve good food, or are they cheap? It really varies from establishment to establishment. They cater to everyone through their franchise restaurants. I suppose that's how they have cornered the market. But I would say that overall, they're good AND cheap. Hey, uncle, anything exciting happened around here since I left? Don't you read the papers? I never have time… You DO watch TV, at least, right? I don't watch TV. I don't like it… But you are aware of the Cooking Contest? Yes… Well, we have a new grand master chef. A young phenom, they say. Pedro Valron's his name. You know, the son of the man behind OmniFood, Edmund Valron. You're kidding, right? He's a new grand master as well, just like his father? Yes, and the boy's got talent the nerve [sic]. Running all us honest-working chefs out of our own businesses, that villain. He's just like his father. Show me how to hire employees now!So the evil restaurant giant OmniFood is using its monopoly power to sell high-quality food at a low price? What scoundrels! That's not how we do things in this business.  After some more tutorial, we can start playing the game. The last thing the tutorial shows you is this screen, our objectives for this mission. Our goal is to make $30,000 in revenue this month while serving at least 35 customers per day. To do this, we'll need a menu!  We start off with just over a dozen recipes. This is a really good one, the Mixed Casserole of Pork. There's a lot of information in this picture, but the important parts are: RATING: how delicious the recipe is. This is really important, as overall food quality is the most important contributor to your restaurant's rating, and many of the game's mission objectives will involve raising your restaurants to a certain rating. The Mixed Casserole of Pork is our highest-rated starting recipe. COOKING TIME: how long the recipe takes to cook. This indicator is a big, fat lie. Each recipe will have a number of clocks listed under "COOKING TIME", but these bear no relation to how long the recipe actually takes to cook. One problem you're likely to face in your restaurants is that you won't have enough chefs to serve all your customers on time, and if your customers get too fed up waiting for their food, they'll just leave without paying for any appetizers and things that they've already had. Therefore, you'll really want to make sure your recipes are quick to cook. The only way to figure out if a recipe cooks quickly or slowly is to watch how long it takes your chef to prepare it. The rule of thumb is that if it goes in the oven, it takes too long, and if it's cooked in a frying pan, it's fine. The Mixed Casserole of Pork (somehow?) cooks very quickly. DEFAULT PRICE and COST: the difference between the price and cost is the gross profit that you earn on the recipe. The Mixed Casserole of Pork has excellent profitability, earning us $12.59 every time we serve it by default.  I'll add the Mixed Casserole of Pork to our menu, which you see here. We can design our own menu by choosing between a whopping two looks. The alternative menu design is shown below.  I'll stick with the default unless someone likes the tacky Eiffel Tower one.  Another consideration is the drinks menu. Importantly, you'll notice that we make about $1-2 in gross profit on all the drinks, except the red wine and white wine on which we make about $10 in gross profit.  In my restaurant, you can drink red wine, you can drink white wine or you can gently caress off.  I move around the tables and buy some more in order to fit in a total of ten tables. You barely ever get more than two people at a time, so buying the bigger 4-person tables is pointless. I also hire some staff, and then I open the restaurant!  Our first guest enters around 11:30, a Monsieur Xabi Gauthier. The cheapass orders the $5.40 baked eggs with cheese with no wine. I'm tempted to throw him out, but in the end I reluctantly serve him.  More guests filter in for lunch, and by 1 PM eight of the ten tables are occupied. We're starting to make some money. Around 2 PM the game notifies me that some customers are unimpressed by the restaurant's food quality. What do these people know about food? I'll have you know I graduated with honors (from some unspecified institution)!  A lot of customers are complaining about my policy of serving red wine and white wine and nothing else.   By 3:30 we have already met our objectives. After serving dinner, we should end up way ahead. This first mission is very difficult to fail.  By the end of the day, we get a profit and loss statement for our Restaurant Empire. We end up with a total revenue of just under $80,000 for the month, far ahead of our $30,000 target. Our profit for the month is a hefty $24,830, which is pretty damned good for an amateur restauranteur! This includes a one-off payment of $20,000 for a Paris liquor licence, so excluding that our profit was about $45,000. Uncle Michel must have really sucked at running a restaurant if he couldn't keep this place profitable.  I put together a short, simple menu just to get through this first mission. I've included a list of all the recipes we currently have below, sorted into good recipes, mediocre recipes and recipes that are really bad and will actively sabotage the restaurant. Let me know if you think we should serve a particular recipe at Treize à Table, and I'll add it to the menu! Good recipes Fried duck liver with asparagus tips (Appetizer) Poached salmon with truffles and shrimp (Appetizer) Eggplant, zucchini, red pepper and parmesan torte (Main course) Mixed casserole of pork (Main course) Mediocre recipes Baked eggs with cheese (Breakfast) Cream drop biscuits (Breakfast) Cream of asparagus soup (Soup) Cream of red bell pepper soup (Soup) Steamed mussels (Main course) Strawberries jubilee (Dessert) Recipes that will destroy this restaurant Dried bean casserole (Main course) Stuffed peppers (Main course) French apple tart (Dessert) Chocolate tart (Dessert) As we progress through the game, we'll acquire lots of new recipes, which I'll highlight as we learn them. Treize à Table currently has the default décor and tables. I've included all the possible wall, floor and table options in the picture below. Since the default is pretty awful, I'm going to have a thread poll decide the décor for Treize à Table and all future restaurants that we acquire.  Thread poll: what décor should our little restaurant have? Vote on wall, floor and table design. For example, to vote for wall type C, floor type D and table type B, vote "CDB". The winning combination will be whatever has the most votes when I play mission 2.
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Jul 2, 2018 21:49
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Let's go full tacky. AAH
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Jul 2, 2018 22:02
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This is going to be fun. I only recall ever getting to the first cooking contest and never playing much further. I would like to see the Chocolate Tart on the menu. You just gotta have some chocolate cake, man. Also, let's go full checkerboard diner experience with DDB.
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Jul 2, 2018 22:07
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Looks interesting! Let's make the decor BAD to the bone. Also I'd be happy if you could sneak in strawberries into every menu! Hopefully there'll be a future good dish, though at least the one to start with isn't terrible.
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Jul 2, 2018 22:16
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Go DDB; I agree with TheMcD, let's just go full-on diner. Also we should add the Poached salmon with truffles and shrimp to our menu so we have at least one decent app.
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Jul 2, 2018 22:16
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Zanzibar Ham posted:Looks interesting! At this point, we have so few recipes that including mediocre recipes is definitely a good idea. And you'll be pleased to know that the ultimate endgame
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Jul 2, 2018 22:37
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BAF And add the poached salmon.
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Jul 2, 2018 22:43
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Enchanted Hat posted:At this point, we have so few recipes that including mediocre recipes is definitely a good idea. And you'll be pleased to know that the ultimate endgame How much leeway do you have to make your restaurant into a trashy greasy spoon, or a pizzeria, or whatever?
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Jul 3, 2018 00:31
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I can see why I wasn't good in this game, wow. That revenue blew everything I ever did out of the water. DDJ for me, and Mixed Casserole of Pork will be our family heirloom recipe. Could you explain why exactly the four disastrous recipes are bad, for each of them? You spoke about long cooking times and low margins, are these a mixture of both or are their cooking times just too long to consider? Finally, is there a snowball effect in this game? For example, is there a chance the latter missions get impossible if you don't start well early, or is every mission achievable no matter what?
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Jul 3, 2018 02:09
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Let's be tacky as hell with all the good recipes and the terrible desserts.
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Jul 3, 2018 03:53
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I'll counter with EDB for maximum black and white tiles. And add fried duck liver with asparagus tips cause that sounds tasty.
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Jul 3, 2018 04:30
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DDB Let's get Guy Fieri all up in this place.
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Jul 3, 2018 04:36
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:How much leeway do you have to make your restaurant into a trashy greasy spoon There is some, actually! The plot is centred around Armand becoming the most amazing fine dining chef ever, and it will eventually force you to make Treize à Table a really high-quality restaurant, but we will later acquire some goofy "themed" restaurants like a trashy rock & roll-themed restaurant and a steakhouse with a giant 50 foot wide cowboy hat on the roof. Also, the game will allow you to make low quality food by cutting the quality of your ingredients. This will make your food way cheaper to cook, increasing your profit margins, but the quality of the food will go down, so you will attract a less wealthy clientele who will in turn be less willing to pay fancy restaurant prices. If all your food has really low ratings you may have to reduce prices, essentially turning you into an inefficient McDonald's. TooMuchAbstraction posted:or a pizzeria, or whatever? This part in particular will become relevant very soon, which is also when the plot starts getting really weird! Enchanted Hat fucked around with this message at 07:48 on Jul 3, 2018 |
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Jul 3, 2018 07:40
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Eeepies posted:I can see why I wasn't good in this game, wow. That revenue blew everything I ever did out of the water. DDJ for me, and Mixed Casserole of Pork will be our family heirloom recipe. Sure, no problem. I grabbed pictures of the recipe pages for the four bad recipes, as well as two good ones that people have asked me to put on the menu: the mixed casserole of pork and the poached salmon with truffles and shrimp. Interlude: Let's talk about good and bad recipes  Mixed casserole of pork This is our best recipe, the pork casserole. It has a rating of 58%, which is the highest of our recipes at the moment. Its profit margin is also excellent, at $12.59 every time we serve it. Under "COOKING TIME", the game shows three clocks. Each recipe shows between one and five clocks under cooking time, but these are entirely meaningless. I put the recipe on the menu and watched Armand make it, and it took him about six seconds to make. When the restaurant is reasonably busy at lunchtime and dinner time, Armand will spend every second cooking non-stop, so time is precious. Since the restaurant makes $12.59 on the mixed casserole and it takes Armand six seconds to make, you could say that the mixed casserole earns us $2.10 for every second spent cooking it.  Poached salmon with truffles and shrimp Here is another good recipe, the poached salmon with truffles and shrimp. That sounds really delicious to me, but unfortunately the game rates this significantly lower than the pork casserole, at only 45% quality. This is fine at this stage of the game, but normally you'd phase this out later in the game once you start getting higher-quality recipes. Looking at the cost and the default price, the default profit is $11.52, nearly as much as the mixed casserole. The cooking time is two clocks, which in this case is also around six seconds, so the poached salmon earns us $1.92 per second.  Chocolate tart This is the chocolate tart. It's got a good rating of 51%, making it one of our highest quality recipes. The difference between the cost and the default price is only $4.74, though, so it makes significantly less money than the pork casserole and the poached salmon. That's OK, because desserts tend not to earn giant profits on their own. The cooking time is two clocks, like the poached salmon, so you'd think that this takes the same amount of time to cook. This is a LIE. The chocolate tart in fact takes about 16 seconds for Armand to cook, nearly three times as long as the poached salmon which also showed two clocks under cooking time. With the recipe's gross profit of $4.74 over 16 seconds, the chocolate tart is earning our restaurant $0.30 per second, making the mixed casserole 600% more profitable. Essentially, Armand is just wasting his time when he's cooking this.  French apple tart This is the apple tart, and I'm pretty sure it's the worst recipe in the entire game. Its quality is 39%, which is one of the lowest in the game. The gross profit is $5, and its cooking time is five clocks, which this time means about 23 seconds. Armand will be earning $0.22 per second while cooking this, and since the quality is so low it will also drag down our restaurant's rating. gently caress this recipe.  Dried bean casserole This recipe looks deceptively good. The rating is kind of low, 45%, but that's acceptable for the start of the game. The gross profit is really good, a whopping $14.12, and the cooking time is three clocks, same as the mixed casserole. Unfortunately, the clocks lie! This actually takes about 16 seconds to cook, which means that you're earning $0.88 per second while also making a low quality dish. This is especially bad because main courses are usually highly profitable and very high quality, so any time someone orders this they will earn you less money, and they'll be dissatisfied with the low quality of the meal.  Stuffed peppers This is a similar story to the dried bean casserole. It's slightly better, having a rating of 48% and a gross profit of $15.01. The cooking time of three clocks means 18 seconds this time around, making the profitability $0.83 per second. Since this is a main course, that's pretty bad. I didn't want to go through all fourteen starting recipes in detail in the first post, but from now on every time we acquire a new recipe I'll show off its recipe page and briefly talk about it and whether or not it might be good or bad. Enchanted Hat fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Jul 25, 2018 |
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Jul 3, 2018 08:16
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Also, in terms of your question about whether there is a snowball effect, it's luckily pretty hard to screw yourself in this game. Every mission the game will give you about three to six months to try to meet its objectives. These objectives are typically either financial ("make $X of revenue or profit"), quality-focused ("turn your new restaurant into a three-star restaurant" or "make sure 80% of your customers are served on time") or they are SPOILERS objectives. Financial objectives are always fairly easy as long as you don't put too many bad recipes on the menu, so those are impossible to lock yourself out of. Some of the quality-focused goals get a little challenging, though. I'll talk about what goes into a restaurant's rating in an update shortly, but the most important part is the food quality. Food quality has a couple of different components, but one very important part is the individual chef's skill. When a chef cooks a particular recipe often, he gets better at making it - essentially earning XP. This means that if for some reason all your chefs have very little practice they could in theory be underlevelled and make bad food which would make it harder for you to meet a quality objective. However, because the game gives you several months to meet the objectives and chefs can earn recipe XP pretty quickly if you have a small menu, I think you'll always have enough time to train your chefs to prepare a few good recipes really well and thus meet your quality objectives. The last type of objective I'll get into once it arises, I don't want to spoil it since it's kind of neat.
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Jul 3, 2018 08:31
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Seconding AAH for a tacky restauraunt with tacky food. What the gently caress is that recipe for "mixed casserole of pork"? 125ml of oil seems like a lot of oil for... anything, let alone a stew, while 75ml of stock is ridiculously low.
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Jul 3, 2018 09:05
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If there aren't goofy cooking battles á la Shokugeki no Soma I will be very disappointed 
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Jul 3, 2018 12:15
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Aesculus posted:Seconding AAH for a tacky restauraunt with tacky food. Don't need stock if you have enough oil. 
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Jul 3, 2018 12:29
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Aesculus posted:Seconding AAH for a tacky restauraunt with tacky food. Thirding this. Don't forget the donkey sauce*! it's just mayonnaise
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Jul 3, 2018 12:57
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Aesculus posted:Seconding AAH for a tacky restauraunt with tacky food. The rule of thumb I've heard of for getting "restaurant-quality" food at home is to add oil. More oil. No, that's not enough. More oil.
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Jul 3, 2018 13:51
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Wow, I never noticed that. There's only 122 grams of pork in the recipe, that's more oil than pork! No wonder that's popular. But don't worry, the recipe also includes 1/4th of a carrot, so it's healthy.
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Jul 3, 2018 13:55
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Woah, that's practically vegan!
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Jul 3, 2018 14:03
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 122 grams of pork is about 4 ounces. It's not a tiny serving size, especially mixed in with casserole ingredients to bulk it up.
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Jul 3, 2018 14:41
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I'm pretty happy someone has played this game other than me! I still don't remember how I managed to get like 50% through this game without any information/guides, then again I never finished it because I then hit a brick wall in difficulty.
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Jul 3, 2018 19:42
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BAI for the decor you loving coward Armand looks like he'd neg you at a wealth management company party
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Jul 3, 2018 21:17
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Enchanted Hat posted:
I think the reason the quality of this dish is so poor is because it's a stewed dish with dried beans but absolutely no wet ingredients to cook or soak the beans with except a third of a tomato, so you just end up with beans like roasted peanuts and also bacon on the side. That said, Apple Tart actually has the most sensible looking ingredient list out of all the foods we have,,so I'm voting for that to be added to the menu.
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Jul 3, 2018 21:47
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Aesculus posted:That said, Apple Tart actually has the most sensible looking ingredient list out of all the foods we have,,so I'm voting for that to be added to the menu.  There's not even any sugar in it! It's a sour, awful, quality 39% apple tart.
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Jul 3, 2018 21:54
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If you lower the quality of your vanilla extracts does it get replaced with Castoreum?
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Jul 3, 2018 21:58
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That sounds disgusting, but yes, probably. I actually completely forgot to mention it, but if you look at the poached salmon with shrimp recipe, I took the quality of the prawns way way down to the lowest possible level which massively boosts profitability but reduces the quality a lot. I don't even know what Armand uses as a substitute for prawns - maybe some kind of small pastry?
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Jul 3, 2018 22:12
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Enchanted Hat posted:I don't even know what Armand uses as a substitute for prawns woodlice DAMN IM HUNGRY fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Jul 3, 2018 |
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Jul 3, 2018 22:17
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drat IM HUNGRY posted:woodlice They're both crustaceans, it's not the worst idea.
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Jul 4, 2018 00:57
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In the original game, your uncle closed down the restaraunt because he had a nasty prostate condition. Yeah. They removed that in patches and also with Restaraunt Empire 2 which basically has the first game in it too.
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Jul 4, 2018 03:50
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Oh man I remember playing this game and I had no idea what I was doing because I played this when I was like 10. I agree with you I never met a single other person who played this, and thus never mentioned it to anyone and did a double take when I saw this pop up here. I tried installing my old disk, but its scratched to poo poo sadly and wouldn't run. Enchanted Hat posted:That sounds disgusting, but yes, probably. I figure he is just using something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_stick except swap crab for prawn juice? Jack2142 fucked around with this message at 05:35 on Jul 4, 2018 |
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Jul 4, 2018 05:22
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I think I tried to play this game once, for almost the whole first mission.  IAmTheRad posted:In the original game, your uncle closed down the restaraunt because he had a nasty prostate condition. Oh and slap some fried duck liver with asperger tips on that menu.
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Jul 4, 2018 08:52
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I like to have a little variety on the menu, so put soup on it (either soup is fine).
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Jul 4, 2018 15:06
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This is the most ruthless capitalism I've seen since I played Recettear. I hope we get the chance to make a little girl cry at some point. When games in brick-and-mortar shops were still a thing I saw this one constantly in the big box stores and was always intrigued by it. When physical media died, I started seeing it on gog instead and more recently steam. It always looked almost interesting enough to buy. Hopefully now I'll finally know the truth and can put whatever Gordon Ramsey spirit is haunting me to rest.
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Jul 4, 2018 16:47
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Episode 2: I need a mortgage to buy this cookbook Good going, Armand! You're catching on fast! Just doing my best to meet your expectations, uncle. So, how did I do? Can I keep Treize à Table? Weeeeeell, not quite just yet. You did very well, but there's still more to do before you pass the test… What would you have me do now? Set up the top floor of the restaurant, Armand. It's completely empty upstairs, but it's valuable real estate that you can accommodate to attract more diners. Sure thing, uncle! As long as I still have a chance at the restaurant! Of course, Armand! I'm not one to back out on my words. If you manage this simple task, consider the restaurant yours. Armand, are you sure you are ready for the next task? There are some things I think you should be aware of… Such as? Well, I haven't explained to you about the Dumb Waiters yet! Why would I ever want to hire obtuse waiters anyway? They're elevators, Armand. And they can help you minimize the food delivery time. Care to learn about that? I'd like to know what strategies I can use to improve my food delivery time? There are several strategies that you can use. One of them is simply hiring good service – you know, the kind that does not engage in idle chit-chat all day. They usually deliver food in good time. Your kitchen and table placement can greatly affect the delivery time as well. When setting up your restaurants, try to minimize walking distances. Are there any quick-fix solutions to the food-delivery time conundrum? Of course, the easiest way is to use the dumb waiter. These functional elevators actually *lift* the food right up to a waiting station upstairs, and voila – no more cold soup! But these Dumb Waiters go for an arm and a leg these days. However, if you can afford it, this is the best long-term solution for your time-consuming food deliveries. Thanks for sharing that with me, uncle… Don't thank me. You're my favourite nephew, Armand. Just let me know whenever you need help… Alright, then, I'll get on the ball. Armand, if you can generate $40,000 in monthly revenue and have 50% of your customers served on time, the restaurant is yours. Since this is an easy task for you to accomplish, let's say that you only have three months to complete this task. Sounds fair? No problem, uncle! Right, then – let's get that ball rolling!Uncle Michel gives us the harrowing task of generating $40,000 in monthly revenue and encourages us to set up the second floor of Treize à Table. Let's get to it! …except, we won't be doing that. This is rather a mean trick that the game plays on you. In addition to the $40,000 revenue goal, the game requires you to serve 50% of your courses on time in order to pass the mission. The first time I played this game, I went to the second floor straight away and crammed in as many tables as I could, hoping to make huge profits from being able to seat three times as many customers as before. However, even in our little one-floor restaurant, Armand is already cooking constantly during lunchtime and dinner time. This means that even if I added more tables, Armand would not actually be able to cook anything for those tables in a timely manner. This would not help our revenue, and would be disastrous for our "courses served on time"-statistic. Therefore, I'm not going to even touch the second floor before we can get a sous chef. In fact, now that our menu includes a couple of very slow-to-cook recipes, I may have to cut back on the number of tables from the present ten if Armand can't keep up. However! I have listened to all your requests for the décor for Treize à Table, and in accordance with the requests of the powerful "tacky as hell"-lobby, I've renovated the restaurant in accordance with the AAH-design:  Yikes. I've also updated the menu to reflect everyone's requests. Thanks to the many goodposters among you, the menu includes all of the good starting recipes, which should make up for the few awful ones  This is the current menu of Treize à Table: Breakfast [nothing] Appetizers Fried duck liver with asparagus tips - $18.20 Poached salmon with truffles and shrimp - $17.60 Soups Cream of asparagus soup - $5.60 Mains Eggplant, zucchini, red pepper and parmesan torte - $16.00 Mixed casserole of pork - $19.20 Desserts Chocolate tart - $6.00 French apple tart - $5.80 Strawberries jubilee - $5.60 Drinks White wine - $15.40 Red wine - $11.25  As part of the tutorial at the start of this mission (which I skipped), we received a new dessert recipe, Crepes Marcie. At this stage of the game, it's an excellent recipe. It's the highest-rated dessert we have at 53%, has a tolerable gross profit and cooks pretty quickly. I would say that this is definitely a good recipe at this stage of the game, so I've put it on the menu.  The first few guests to enter the restaurant turn on their heels and leave, and I get a complaint message that I've never seen before, stating that they're refusing to eat because of a lack of "tasty dishes". However, this stops happening around lunchtime. I'm pretty sure this is because we have no breakfast recipes, and breakfast customers will refuse to eat any other kind of dishes. This is not a big deal, because breakfast dishes tend to have terrible profit margins, and the few breakfast customers you get won't normally order wine. The only thing we're losing out on is a bit of extra revenue, and since our revenue target is so low, this shouldn't be a problem. However, it'd be worth thinking about adding at least one breakfast dish.  One of our lunch guests calls us over, a Monsieur Elric Vicient, and he offers to sell us a super secret special recipe for the low low price of $11,880! This would be laughable, but since Armand has never heard of cookbooks, buying outrageously priced recipes off your customers is actually the main way to get new recipes in this game. Admiring his chutzpah, I take him up on his offer.  It's a dud. Although the recipe has a great profit margin, the quality rating is very low, and it has to be grilled, which will be inconvenient to set up in the kitchen. I'd say that this is a mediocre recipe.  Another customer comes along with a hideously overpriced recipe. It looks like the rumour of Armand being a total sucker has gotten around. Customers will also be trying to scam us in other ways, but we've been fortunate to get two recipe offers in a row. I pay him the $14,850 he's asking for.  Now this is just excellent. The recipe has a rating of 57%, making it our second-highest quality recipe, and it sells at a decent profit margin. The cooking time shows two clocks, but as we know, that could mean anything. Nevertheless, this appears to be a good recipe, and I add it to the menu immediately.  This guy apparently couldn't find a recipe to swindle us with, so instead he calls us over and tells us that we're making the poached salmon wrong. He offers to come into the kitchen to show us the proper way to prepare it for only $10,800. Paying for cooking skill increases is useless, because Armand's skill with individual recipes rises pretty quickly on its own, so I make a counter-proposal and offer to show the customer the door if he doesn't shut up.  It's dinner time, the restaurant is full and Armand is struggling. If you click your chef, the game shows you your cooking queue. Armand currently has a queue of 22 dishes that he has to prepare to fulfil our guests' orders. That's pretty bad on its own, but since some of the recipes on our menu cook very slowly, he's going to have a difficult time getting through the list before the guests get frustrated and leave. I expect we'll still be able to pass the mission, but if we had set up the second floor, it would have been nearly impossible to meet the requirement for 50% of dishes to be served on time. A devious trap set for us by the game!  It's the end of the day, and we've done very well. Our revenue has dipped to $70,000 per month, which is still very respectable, and 79% of the courses served on time is also quite good.   The game offers you surprisingly detailed financial and operational information if you want it. Our two starters plus the mixed casserole of pork make up a total of 65% of our profit from food, which shows how crucial just a couple of really good recipes are for your restaurant. Our biggest cash cow, however, is the wine, which is not only incredibly profitable but doesn't have to be prepared. It's been a pretty easy ride so far, but watch out! Next mission, Restaurant Empire will be introducing an exciting new game mechanic that will push Armand's cooking ability to the limit, while simultaneously testing if he knows at least a quarter of the alphabet. Like the 125ml of oil in his mixed casserole of pork, will he rise to the top? We will see!
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Jul 4, 2018 18:04
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I can't wait to see Armand's Alphabet Soup.
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Jul 4, 2018 18:29
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| # ? Jan 20, 2021 01:44 |
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This game rings so many bells, from the interface to the horrendous dialogue, that I'm not sure if I played it ages ago and repressed the memories or if I saw it in another Let's Play or something. Definitely looking forward to more though.
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Jul 4, 2018 19:00
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