Part 9: The secret of the French spaghetti

Episode 8: The secret of the French spaghetti



Good one, Armand. I read the article. I think you made a good impression with Secondo.

He was raving about the restaurant afterwards – especially the food!

I've got something else to tell you. You know the financial district here in Rome, right? I bought a restaurant there. Great potential. All those banking yuppies need a place to eat, right?

Sure, I guess.

Trust me on this one, Armand. We've got a gold mine on our hands.

What kind of restaurant is it?

Ah, I almost forgot to tell you. It's a French one. You know those bankers – have to eat *imported*. But this one's right up your alley. The only caveat is that you might have to rearrange the furniture a bit – it's already jam-packed as it is, and your waiters may have a hard time delivering the courses on time.

What do you want me to do?

Run it. Get it back in shape. I mean, there's nothing wrong with it. The books even reported solid earnings – I checked before buying. Just hire staff and get it running again.

When do you expect to see results?

I don't know, Armand. This should be easy stuff for you by now. I'll tell you what: I'm off to Los Angeles this month. When I come back, I'll check up on your progress.

All right, I'll be going now. See you soon.

Take care, Armand. And take it easy. You've earned a break. French is your mettle. You'll find that you have a very easy time getting it to start operating.

And have a good trip, Don. I'll see you soon.

Bye, Armand.


I like how they turn the bad pathfinding into a story feature. Waiters are unable to find their way around the furniture? That's not a bug, it's a feature!



Anyway, we have a new restaurant! This is Le Palourde Chantante, or "The Singing Clam". I think it should have been "La Palourde Chantante", but the Don's not a native French speaker, so we'll give him a break.



This is the inside of our new restaurant. What, uh… what were they even going for here? Why the weird, tiny partitions? Why are there only five tables? My urge to optimise is SCREAMING at me!

Before we get started, Uncle Michel wants a word with us.



Hello, Armand. Nice of you to come.

Hi, uncle. What do you want to talk to me about?

Well, your performance so far has been fantastic! In fact, the financial sector has agreed to raise your credit limit.

Uncle, that's great news!

THE FINANCIAL SECTOR HAS UPGRADED YOUR ASSET RATING, AND HAS AGREED TO INCREASE YOUR LOAN LIMIT! YOU CAN USE THE BANK LOAN OPTION IN THE REPORTS INTERFACE.

Thanks for the info, uncle! I guess I'll be off to take out a loan!

Good luck, Armand. You're doing stupendously. If you continue like this, I'm sure it won't be long before they upgrade your credit rating again!


"The financial sector" called Armand's uncle and told him that they've increased his nephew's credit limit? Do we have any banker goons who can confirm whether this is normal procedure?



We can take out a loan of up to $1.4 million now. I have never tried doing it, because first of all, there's nothing to spend the money on, and secondly, we're already ROLLING in cash that we can't even spend. Now if Uncle Michel could dial up the financial sector and ask them if they have any shady offshore investment funds that we could park our huge excess profits in, that'd be something, but alas.



This mission is very simple. We have to increase our average restaurant rating to 3.5 stars, win another Italian cooking contest and increase the monthly profits of Le Palourde Chantante to $25,000 a month (not shown here, the goal screen can only show two objectives at a time for some reason).



We're already well on our way towards fulfilling the restaurant rating objectives. Mostly thanks to our incredibly good service rating, Treize à Table is already at 3.5 stars, and La Cosa Nostra is at 4. If our new restaurant weren't dragging us down, we'd be done already.

This is the rating screen for Treize à Table. The rating is based on the food quality, the service quality and how pleasant the restaurant environment is. The rating is then reduced based on how high your prices are and how many complaints you get. Treize à Table gets a ton of complaints, mostly because of our very limited drinks menu, so this'll drag our rating down significantly by the end of the month.



The restaurant's environment rating is subdivided into the quality of the decoration (which is excellent because of all our fine art), the comfort of the table sets (poor – we picked the cheapest, most awful table sets available) and the quality of the exterior and the view. This rating is terrible, so let's fix it!



The game allows us to add certain small, tasteful embellishments to our restaurant's façade. Naturally, it's important not to go overboard.



Let's build a giant gothic clock tower!



I bought every single embellishment I could, and our exterior and view rating is now at a near-perfect 97%. Much better!



While I'm in Treize à Table, I update the menu based on the requests from the thread and reluctantly cut the number of tables down to thirteen!

As for the suggestions to the restaurant's pricing, I'm going to retain dictatorial control over menu prices, as they're my main way of manipulating our restaurants' profits and quality ratings. Also, I don't want to wake up next to a marble horse head once our profits start to dip.



I also stop by La Cosa Nostra. After intense discussion in the thread, it was ultimately decided not to close the restaurant for lunch. However, as a compromise, I've had the light level lowered in order to give the restaurant that proper mafia ambience (thus convincing federal investigators that this cannot be a mafia front, because it'd be too obvious).



And presto!



Of course, La Cosa Nostra could also use an exterior overhaul. Its exterior and view rating is only at 25%, which is even worse than Treize à Table's.



It makes sense that the restaurant has a poor exterior and view rating. La Cosa Nostra doesn't really have a view of anything particularly interesting (La Cosa Nostra at the top left of the picture).

So let's redo the façade!



Remember: the key here is tasteful restraint.



Perfect. I buy everything and bump the exterior and view rating to a clean 100%.



I finally head over to our new restaurant, Le Palourde Chantante. Because it's currently such a travesty, I delete absolutely everything and start over. Look at all this space. They couldn't fit more than FIVE tables in here?



I temporarily outfit it the boring, optimal way. Twenty of the most expensive tables, efficient menu and a sad lack of giant pointless decorations. I'm counting on you guys to help me ruin this!



I also transfer Thierry and Stefano from La Cosa Nostra to run the kitchen. Thierry is surprisingly good at French mains and soups, so he'll make a good head chef.



I open the restaurant and watch it operate. I notice that the restaurant has a problem: we don't get a lot of customers. Even during dinner, the busiest time of day, we get around 40%-50% occupancy. I'm a little concerned about the restaurant's profitability.



We get the month's results for Le Palourde Chantante. Although it looks dire, the loss of $37,529 includes $50,000 spent on staff training and $20,000 spent on a liquor license. Once we stop the staff training we should meet the $25,000 profit target, but this restaurant isn't going to be as ridiculously profitable as Treize à Table and La Cosa Nostra.



Wow! That was some great food! In fact, that was some of the best regional French fare I've had in a long while – even better than in my native Liguria…


We suddenly get a visitor! While I'm happy to get a guest who doesn't want to insult our food and then ask for thousands of dollars, I'm not sure you can call Ligurian cuisine "regional French fare".

I must thank you for such a rewarding meal!

So… What's so special or different about Ligurian fare?

It's no secret that Liguria is home to superb fishing along the Italian coastline. Our soils are ideally suited for horticulture cultivation.

And you already know that chefs can only create magnificence with great ingredients. Those are the keys to Ligurian culinary prowess.


At this point the game forces us to hire this guy. I guess I can have him cook his Ligurian "regional French fare" at La Cosa Nostra.

You seem like a knowledgeable and reasonable chef. Would you like to work with me?

Well, if your restaurant prepares their recipes as well as that last dish I tried, then of course! I could benefit from working in a restaurant that holds their food in such high regard.

So – you will join my team of soon-to-be-renowned chefs?

Of course! I'll report right away!

NICCOLO SHOULD BE WORKING IN YOUR KITCHEN EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY!

… AND THROUGH HIRING NICCOLO, YOU HAVE GAINED KNOWLEDGE OF THE SECRET LIGURIAN SPAGHETTI WITH ARTICHOKES RECIPE – A RARE CLASSIC! NOW ALL YOU NEED ARE THE RIGHT INGREDIENTS TO PREPARE THIS DELICACY!



With Niccolo, we get his top secret Ligurian spaghetti. The picture looks pretty uninspiring, but it's actually a really high-quality recipe. The profitability is poor, but the quality is amazing. A good recipe. Speaking of high-quality recipes, we still need to go and win the Italian cooking contest!



Three rounds: an Italian recipe, an Italian appetizer and green pea ravioli. What's convenient about this contest is that we can enter with two chefs. Now, to someone playing this game in good faith, that means you can enter with two chefs whose skills complement each other, increasing your chance of victory. For me, it means I can drag Thierry along while Mario Corleone wins it on his own. That way, Thierry's reputation will go up, which should hopefully attract more customers to Le Palourde Chantante.



It's the usual suspects, but they've brought backup this time. Here, Giuseppe Caroni has brought along Marco Penelli, a chef with a much less interesting outfit. They will be making ribbon pasta with mussels and zucchini.



Meanwhile, Leonardo Varesi is entering with Pietro Brunotti. They're making prawns with fried snow peas – one of our classics!



We could crush them with the unstoppable force of Mario's guilt-free cappuccino sundae, but I decide to try out our new Ligurian spathetti. Mario hasn't trained with this recipe, but he's very good at Italian appetizers, so I think we should be all right.



Oh, we won that round really easily. For some reason, the game takes a while before it ramps up the difficulty of the cooking contests.



For round two, both the opposing teams are making cold spaghetti salad. Come on, guys, that doesn't even sound nice.



Like a new Caesar, we alone rule over the Italian cooking circuit.

Neither Mario nor Thierry know how to prepare the last dish properly, the green pea ravioli. But at this point, who is left to oppose us?



I only now notice that one of the rival teams is named "Roman Imperial Chefs". Damn it, you guys stole my gimmick!



We win pasta Napolitana! It's bad. Terrible rating, terrible profitability. A bad recipe.



I go back and beat the cooking contest again, and we win the recipe for arugula ravioli with tomato pancetta butter. Wow. This recipe is ridiculous. It is, by a wide margin, the best recipe we've seen so far. I'm adding it to the menu of La Cosa Nostra immediately, and I have Mario start practicing. A good recipe.



At the end of the day, we win the scenario! Le Palourde Chantante ended up with a profit of around $39,000, which is unimpressive but sufficient.

This was a pretty straightforward mission, but the next mission is going to shake things up a little. For one, we're setting up yet another new restaurant, but more interestingly, we're meeting an important new character - one that I'm sure the game will treat with dignity and respect!




New restaurant, new décor! We already voted on French décor for Treize à Table, but this is a chance for us to try something a bit different if we want. The pictures above show the options for the walls, floor and tables. Note that this time I have divided the tables by quality. The top row of tables (A through F) are quality tables that shouldn't bother our guests. Tables G through K are terrible, uncomfortable tables – we can pick those, but we're going to get a LOT of complaints.

Thread poll: what décor should we have in Le Palourde Chantante?

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 the next mission.

We also need some art! We've already had some people in the thread make cool edits to the French paintings – if you want to contribute, please edit the texture files below and post the edited image in the thread!