Part 9: Barefaced

Episode 9: Barefaced



Chef Armand.

Hello Chef. La Lune Vague has been treating you well?

Yes Chef. The restaurant has been a splendid experience so far.

Excellent! I'm happy for you. Well, I'm not going to beat around the bush with you here. The reason why I called you is because I wanted to tell you that I've signed you up for one of the culinary contests here in France. I wanted to give you a heads up and prepare yourself for the upcoming contest.

I'm honoured that you've put so much faith in me Chef…

Well, as I said before, I think you're very talented in the kitchen.

You haven't asserted yourself enough to give me an accurate impression. But I have every confidence in your abilities. You are my apprentice after all.

I'm grateful for this opportunity sir. I won't let you down.

I know you won't.



So, since Armand is already the greatest chef in the world, there really isn't a reason for him to be competing in cooking competitions and climbing the chef leaderboards. So what's the solution? Have his apprentice do it instead! This will be the beginning of the meteoric rise of Ozkan "doesn't know what a soufflé is" Zygmunt!

But first, let's check out the new Amo La Torta



Welcome to brown town. This could have been themed as a tropical beach !



With the restaurant looking like this, the festive pineapple and grapefruit lamps are just a cruel reminder of what might have been.



Since the last mission took so long to complete, I've managed to research a bunch of new patisserie recipes. This is the first one, the fruit cake. At this point, I'd like to see just one Restaurant Empire recipe that uses a reasonable amount of flour.



This is the most polygonal cake yet. You could cut yourself on those edges.



These just look kind of sad.



These are supposed to contain jam, but the recipe makes up for that by adding way too much sugar.



I don't actually know what's in vanilla creamer, so I'm just going to assume that this recipe is fine.



This is approximately one trillion calories and probably delicious.



I'd like to know what kind of eldritch magic you'd need to use to turn milk, raspberries and a tiny bit of sugar and cream into what's in that picture.



That is not a pudding. That's weak carrot soup.



There's an overlap between patisserie beverage recipes and coffee shop recipes. When you're researching patisserie beverages, you'll nearly always get something that can also be served at your coffee shops. This would be useful if patisseries and coffee shops weren't both totally awful.



Finally I can serve overpriced alcohol at my patisseries and coffee shops!

Now, before we start the business day properly and get inundated with even more recipes, let's go and challenge the cooking contest!



This is Le Stade St-Jean, France's premier cooking arena! It looks like they totally rebuilt it in the time between Restaurant Empire 1 and 2. Cooking is a very big deal in this universe.



The rules of the cooking contest are simple. There is only one round and the competing chefs are allowed to cook any French dish.

The French local contest is the lowest tier of the cooking contest ladder. Ozkan will be competing against amateurs cooking mediocre recipes.



Meanwhile, we have the ultimate recipe from Restaurant Empire 1, the stuffed lamb in a potato crust with truffles which we used to crush OmniFood once and for all. This should be easy.



In Restaurant Empire 1, you could pick your own team of chefs for the cooking contests (except the very last one). In Restaurant Empire 2, they put a stop to that, and now they're much more restrictive about who gets to enter the contests. So any hypothetical "spite run" of Restaurant Empire 2 where you transfer Delia to Treize à Table and turn her into your star chef while Armand toils in the coffee shops is not going to work, unfortunately .



I know I've said this before, but cooking is a big deal in this universe. Look at this arena!



At the top left of this screen, we see our chosen recipe and three numbers: 100%, 85% and 90%. 100% is Ozkan's personal skill at cooking the chosen recipe. He's had a very long time to practice, so he cooks the stuffed lamb perfectly. 85% is the quality of the recipe itself, based on its inherent quality and the quality of our ingredients. 90% is the skill- and recipe quality-weighted score of the dish that we're making. This is your minimum score. You can help your chef during the cooking contest in order to raise the final score a couple of points.



By completing these intense, high-speed minigames! Do you remember the first six letters of the alphabet?!



Can you click a button once the yellow dot is near the red dot?!



Can you, um, see if one image is pretty similar to another image? Do you have functioning eyes?



If you do, you'll probably do okay in this contest. Ozkan beat the competition by 41 points out of 100.



To celebrate, let's do a little dance!







We win $10,000 as well as this recipe for fish wellington. In Restaurant Empire 1, Armand made a special version of this recipe which he named "Delia Wellington", dedicated to his beloved Delia. I guess he doesn't bother doing that anymore, since now it's just "fish wellington" again.



For some reason, the game usually allows you to beat the cooking contests a second time for more prize money and another recipe. This time we win the recipe for carbonara. Curiously enough, this is the same recipe we won after repeating the first cooking contest in Restaurant Empire 1. Deliberate callback or laziness? You decide!



Now let's get back to business at Amo La Torta. I notice that we're actually floating quite a lot of cash at the moment, so it'd be a good idea to pay back our bank loans.



Bam! Debt free. As long as we don't get any more useless, unprofitable restaurants, we should be able to stay above water going forward.



I bought this pastry recipe. The quality rating is really good compared to our other pastry recipes, but unfortunately this is cooked in a coffee shop blender (somehow?), which means it'll take really long to cook. I'll still use it at I Heart Cake since we get so few customers there.



I also buy this raisin cinnamon roll recipe. Whoever theorised that we used up most of the world's cinnamon supply during Restaurant Empire 1 was probably right.



And after buying this recipe for another $46,000 or so, we're right back to having no next to no money. Time to go into debt again!



The guests are definitely getting greedier. At the beginning of the game, wholesalers would ask us for $3,000 to establish a supply relationship. Then for a while it was $6,000, and now they're asking for $9,000. I think they can smell weakness.



You buy sixteen cakes. What do you get?



Another day older and deeper in debt.

We now have slightly more debt than we had before I paid off our debt at the start of this mission .

I'm going to do what Armand does and try to escape my problems at the TV studio.



Where were you?

Whoa! I didn't know you were there. You startled me…

Well? WHERE WERE YOU?



Uh oh! Armand has been out all night, and we need to think up an alibi! Let's pretend it was work.

I was over at the studio. We just finished prepping for the next taping.

Why are you still up this late in the morning?

I'll ask the questions.

Seems awfully convenient for you though isn't it, having these excuses for your late nights?

What are you saying exactly? Look, I can't help it if something comes up… what are you insinuating here honestly?

You're lying to me aren't you?

Okay, I don't like where this is going and I don't appreciate your tone. I'm telling you.



Oh shit, she didn't buy that! Let's try another excuse.

We were doing a late service in the restaurant… What else do you want me to say?!

I knew you were lying! You can't even get your excuses straight! How long has this streak of yours been going on huh? HOW LONG?!


Wait, no, that made it worse.

I was at the studio prepping… What else do you want me to say?!

No, I don't believe you. I can tell when you lie. Your eyes blink a few more times than usual whenever you do. And you're doing that now. You're hiding something from me…

What?! I'm telling you the truth. I can't believe you don't believe me!

Just tell me Armand. Be honest with me… are you having an affair?

I… I… can't believe this… I can't believe you don't trust me… I'm speechless… I'm

So I guess that's it, you don't trust me? Hmph! FINE!!... I'm outta here!

Fine! And don't come back!!



Well, that could have gone better. Let's just go and do an episode.



Tonight, we are pulling out a vegetarian's dream. We've got an entrée soup for you today as well as a main course with vegetables as our main ingredients. The soup in question would be my very own Pasta Vegetable Chowder.

Full disclosure folks, this isn't actually my own recipe. This was passed on to me by my mum who was an excellent cook herself. I made a few tweaks here and there and voila…



I will say this, Armand is definitely a pro. The show must go on!



For our main course, I am going to show you how to make the Cream of Broccoli Baked Potato. Unlike the entrée we'd just prepared, this recipe is totally my own handiwork.

A common mistake green cooks experience with baking potato is that they just dump their peeled potatoes in a baking pan. This creates a very uneven product. What you want to do is poke a few holes into your potatoes with a fork first and…



I never noticed until now just how weird this TV kitchen is. Wood diamond wallpaper over dark green countertops?



That's it for today. I hope you enjoyed our show. From all of us here in the sandy beaches of Miami, we bid you goodnight. Remember, creativity and variety are the best ingredients in cooking; get those two mixing together and you'll have one happy stomach! Take care everyone!


Wait, what? Miami? Maybe Armand really is a bit rattled, he even forgot his dumb little signoff catchphrase.



Anyway, we won the mission! A lot of stuff happened that wasn't that great, but at least we didn't get any more patisseries. Let's hope that's a continuing trend!