Part 4: The one that's 90% recipes

Episode 4: The one that's 90% recipes

Sweetie, I'm home!

Hey you. How was your trip?



Pretty good. Got some good work done so, yeah, overall I'm happy.

Did you get what you were after?

Uh huh. I was able to set up a contract with this local bean exporter over there. And they've promised a steady shipment of their Kopi Luwak beans to us.

And customs?

I've spoken to them as well. All's good. I don't think they'll give us much grief.

How are the coffee shops?

They're fine. Shops practically run themselves.

I was thinking on the plane over here that since everything seems to be coming together rather well lately – with the new coffee supply, furniture store and whatnot – I thought this might be the perfect time to set up a third café. What do you think?

Well I think at this point, you don't really need to ask for my permission.

I wasn't asking for a go-ahead. I just want to know what your thoughts are.

I think that… as long as the shops are doing well, then you should do whatever it is you feel is right…

…ok… Honey I'm sorry again that I had to dump my responsibilities on you the other day. I didn't really mean to ; it was just that I didn't have much choice at the time and…

No, no. It's fine. I'm just glad everything worked out for you.

…

Well umm, I gotta go…

Ok… I'll see you later?

Yeah. Bye hon.



Well, that was unusually awkward. Here's the new café! It's pretty much the same as our last café. Don't worry, though, the game is going to slow down with the cafés now, and we'll soon get to see some new cool stuff.



This is the default look of our new café, "Delacourt Rodeo". It's far too sensible. Let me see what I can do.



Okay, I was kind of stumped here, there really isn't much you can do with the modern coffee shop decors. I settled on "vaguely sci-fi library".



I kick Armand out of Delacourt Sunset and put Delia back in her post. I also update all our coffee recipes.



I've replaced our four-star Colombian coffee beans from Laurent's import business with the new five-star Kopi Luwak that Delia sourced. Now absolutely all our coffee is made with Kopi Luwak. That sounds awful, but the game disagrees with me, and now all of our coffee recipes have significantly higher quality ratings.



This is fortunate, as our objectives this mission are to raise the "food" (coffee) ratings of Delacourt Sunset and Delacourt Rodeo to 3.0 and 2.8, respectively. The Kopi Luwak should help us a lot in doing that. In addition to that, we also need to record the first episode of Armand's TV show.

Also, is there some famous French person named Delacourt that these cafés are named after, or are they seriously trying and failing to spell Delia's last name, Delecoeur? I have no idea.



I looked at the suggestions in the thread, and the five most popular recommendations for recipe research were:

- French desserts
- American desserts
- Coffee shop other drinks
- Coffee shop tea
- Coffee shop food

I interpreted votes for the most profitable coffee shop drinks as votes for "other drinks", as they do tend to have excellent profit margins, and I'm hoping that we'll get a recipe that isn't slow to prepare so I can ditch all the other ones.

Speaking of recipes, we got a handful of new recipes when we opened Delacourt Rodeo, which I have included below.








The decaf espresso and iced Americano are really nice, and they'll be even better once we replace the regular coffee beans with Kopi Luwak. The default profit margins are bad, but the really high quality will let us raise our prices, so it should work out pretty well. The orange splash gets an honourable mention for mixing orange juice and milk, which seems like a fantastic idea that absolutely won't result in a disgusting curdled mess.



Now that we've been to Richard's furniture store, our guests will start giving us tips about other furniture wholesalers. At least they'll tell us for free.



This is another new thing introduced in Restaurant Empire 2 to drain your money. Guests will now offer to sell you guidebooks that increase your cooking skill.



While guests in Restaurant Empire 1 would offer to sell you tips on how to prepare specific recipes, this guidebook will increase a chef's skill with every type of coffee shop recipe by 5 percentage points. That's a much better deal, and I'd pretty much always recommend buying these. Delia's our top coffee shop cook/barista, so she gets the bonus.



I buy this ginger cake recipe. Or should I say, this ginger sour cream recipe.



A customer gives me a tip about putting orange wedges and whipped cream in the iced espresso. One the one hand, why? On the other hand, that is 74% recipe quality, I'll happily ruin an iced espresso for that.



Shortly after, I buy this. I have never heard of a "Lamington", but this is by far the worst recipe I've ever seen in this game. And I'm not even sure why! The ingredients are butter, egg, flour, sugar and vanilla, I don't see how you could possibly go wrong with that! It's a mystery.



The month ends, and we're not quite there yet with the quality. Our recipes are quite good at this point, but the barista at Delacourt Rodeo is brand new, so she'll need a couple of months to build up her cooking skill.

But, now that a month has passed, we've gotten one new recipe from each of our research investments!



This is our new American dessert recipe, the very cute heart-shaped blueberry muffins.



This is our new French dessert, the French apple tart, which is a fucking insult. Never put this on the menu, ever.



This is our new rose tea. They forgot the tea. This is literally just rose petals in water.



This is the new mixed drink. The quality rating kills most of these recipes, but if we keep investing, we should see some better stuff.



Finally, the new coffee shop food recipe. Wwhen I saw the name "bacon 'n ham cheese sandwiches", I wasn't expecting feta cheese.

The first recipe in any given category only takes a month to research, then each additional recipe takes a bit longer than the previous. We'll probably see another wave of research recipes during the next mission.



Now that we have a bunch of new recipes and the new café is well underway, let's do the TV show!



So Armand, are you ready for this?

As ready as I'll ever be George.

Good, good. You nervous?

As nervous as I'll ever be George.

Haha, don't worry Armand, I'm sure you'll do fine. Just remember that the whole show's future rests on your performance today. Do badly and we'll all blame you.

We'll all be out of a job if I do badly anyway, we probably won't see each other after.

Haha chin up, Armand. Go get 'em.



Good morning everyone! Today marks a very exciting time in my life. My name is Armand Lebouf and this is the inaugural episode of my cooking show…

Of course many of you likely don't recognize me. Don't worry though, that's ok. Right now we may be strangers to each other, but I'm sure we are not strangers to the taste of good food.

Hopefully, as we move along, we'll get to ride on a journey together, a wonderful journey through the world of marvelous-tasting dishes…

Today we will be looking to France for the inspiration for our dishes. And the first meal I will be introducing to you is my delectable mussel appetizer with salmon filling. It's a personal concoction of mine that has been gaining fans in my restaurant lately…



TV means more Bejeweled with a slightly smaller play area. Thankfully, it's not that hard.



One of the more popular dishes in my restaurant is the Beef Tenderloin with Red Wine Sauce.

At my house, this dish is a particular favorite of mine whenever I want to impress guests with my cooking. And by freezing the sauce ahead of time, it can make a dinner party at your home an easy yet elegant experience.



More Bejeweled. Strangely, the previous Bejeweled board had me matching big slabs of beef, even though we were making mussels, and now that we're making beef tenderloin, we're matching mussels? :gamedesign:



Well that's it from all of us here in the studio. I hope you enjoyed our show today and please tune back in with us for our next journey through the world of good food.

Just remember this little train of thought: a dash of creativity and a pinch of variety is the wonderful blend to a satisfied stomach! Good night everyone!



Such a memorable sign-off. With the first episode of the TV show taken care of, I switch the barista from Delia's First Coffee Shop in to sort out the food quality issues at Delacourt Rodeo, and sure enough, it helps us win the mission!

Next mission, we'll be going back to our roots and focusing on Treize à Table. Armand was actually mostly okay this mission, so hopefully he'll keep that decency up for the next one and not do exactly the opposite!