Part 12: The power of the soul

Episode 11: The power of the soul



Hiya, Armand! I must admit, Delia's participation was certainly useful.

I'm glad to hear that. Too bad she has to go back to attend her job duties in the market.


Wait, what?

I guess running a restaurant was a bit tough for her the first time around, eh?

Yes, but she still did fine. I just might give her another chance in the future, however. So – what does the board have to say now?


Oh, I see. I guess having a woman chef manage a restaurant was just too unrealistic, so the game removes her from your restaurant staff the very next mission. So what about our quota from the board of directors? Do we have to go and find another woman chef for our business, or will the game just gloss over that, and we'll never see another woman chef in the entire game? It's the latter.

Well, the market report indicates that LA could benefit from some variety. My recommendation is for you to start a seafood restaurant.

You want me to setup a seafood restaurant?

Seafood should prove to be very popular to Los Angeleans. You know, they've got deep oceans as well as deep pockets here. Seriously, though, Armand, there's a huge demand for seafood here in LA.

What goals are we aiming for?

The Board has instructed me to tell ya, Armand, that they have arranged so that this food critic that goes by the name of Secondo Gordini will come and try out your new seafood restaurant.

You mean that Secondo's coming to visit the *Hope and Anchor*, right? Well, that's great! I haven't seen Secondo for a while. It'd be nice to cater to him here in LA.

He is looking forward to try out your new seafood establishment. We want the review to be a reasonably decent one, so make sure that you impress Secondo, alright?

Now, to change the subject a little, a good friend of mine has tipped me off about a black chef that is simply remarkable with spicy food. He just came from Louisiana, and is looking for a job.

What do you want me to do with him?

If he shows up in your restaurant, by all means, hire him! He is a great chef, but picky sometimes. He might need a bit of persuasion to join…

Well, if that's the board's decision, I'll try to convince him to join me.

Good! There's one last thing, and you don't have to achieve this goal, but it would do wonders for your restaurant rating as well as your own career…

What would that be?

Try to be within the world's top 20 chefs. If you do as the board has instructed you to, you should not have any problems with this, either. But note that this is not a requisite, but it would impress the heck outta the board if you do reach the goal.

OK. Got it. I'll give it my best.

Great, then! Oh, and the board of directors would like to give you something to help you with your new seafaring venture…

RICHARD HANDS OVER TWO RECIPES TO YOU – A GRILLED SHRIMP WITH ROASTED-GARLIC HERB SAUCE AND FISH BURGERS WITH SPICY SAUCE TO HELP YOU WITH YOUR NEW RESTAURANT.

Thanks! I'll start right away.

I'll see you in a few months to check up on your progress.



Ahoy, mateys! We have a new seafood restaurant, the Hope and Anchor! I hope you like the name, Armand has thought long and hard about it – going by the conversation between him and Dick, approximately 15 seconds in total. Also, is it just me, or did Armand sound pretty hesitant about hiring a black chef? "Well, if that's the board's decision, I guess I'll try…"

Before I get to our new restaurant, I'll need to return to Wagons Ho!, which needs a remake as well as a new head chef now that Delia has quit.



Unfortunately, to my surprise, the most popular décor configuration BAD turned out to be a fairly tasteful all-wood design with simple wood table sets. In order to make up for that, I've significantly tuned up the skulls and artwork.



The children's maize maze, on the other hand, is looking great! I touched up the corn texture on the corn columns and used them for this fun adventure to the hidden tipi! Also, solving the corn maze is the only way to the restrooms, so if you really need to go, I hope you're good at mazes.



Because Dalia quit and we just got a new restaurant, we're actually pretty short on chefs. I'm only able to staff Wagons Ho! with a single chef, Bruce Allen, so I've had to temporarily cut the number of tables drastically. Meanwhile, I've transferred Stan Mazowski to run the Hope and Anchor. Stan Mazowski. That's how dire the situation is.



I just wanted to take another look at the wonderful custom pictures before heading to the new restaurant.



So this is the Hope and Anchor, another huge restaurant. What's good about seafood restaurants is that it's nearly impossible to make them look nice. Every wall option is some kind of garish turquoise and most of the floors are bizarre tile patterns. Those wall lights? Jellyfish.



Look at those fucking fish tables. I feel like we wouldn't even be able to make this better with texture mods.



Dick gave us a couple of seafood recipes to help us get started. This is the first one, the grilled shrimp. Now, before I evaluate this from a gameplay perspective, I'd just like to note how ugly and unappetizing the picture looks. Grilled shrimp is something that should be really easy to make look fabulous on a plate, so how did Armand turn it into such an ugly brown mess?

Anyway, the quality and profitability are both mediocre, but our American repertoire is pretty bad, so normally I would add this to the menu if not for the fact that it's cooked on a grill. Adding a grill to the kitchen is a hassle, because I try to make the kitchens as small and efficient as possible, and in order to use the grill, the chef will have to leave the stove, walk over to the grill, cook this, then walk back to the stove and resume cooking non-grill recipes. This adds a few seconds to the recipe's effective cooking time, which means that from a business perspective, it's rarely worth it to add grill recipes in my opinion. Overall, a mediocre recipe.



Now this is what I'm talking about! This recipe has a very high quality rating (though not quite enough to be a competition recipe), and its gross profit is just eye-wateringly huge! By default, this earns us $18.66 in profit each time we serve it. I've added it to both the Hope and Anchor and Wagons Ho!



A customer at Le Palourde Chantante sells me this recipe for turkey, chicken liver and mushroom paté. Is this something people order at restaurants as a main course? Two giant slices of paté and some slices of bread? It's probably delicious, but it seems more like an hors d'oeuvre. Anyway, the quality is mediocre but the profitability is really good. Assuming this is quick to cook, this looks like a good recipe.

Shortly after, I get called to Wagons Ho! to speak with a customer there.



Hi there! May I help you?

Yo, bro! Name's Tyrone. Tyrone Simpson. And check this out: I'm here to try out your fantastic food that Mr. Gordini has been writing about.


Oh boy.

I heard that he was most flattering in his review of my restaurant…

That's why I've gotsa try your food. I can't believe that he knocked my food and not yours…

What do mean, he knocked your food? [sic]

The homey totally dissed my food. I don't know why – maybe his Italian taste buds ain't familiar with spicy. Either that, or the homey just can't handle the spice! But the fact is I now gots a bad rap due to that homey…

Where are you from, Tyrone?

Way down south, in New Orleans. But the business is bad there at the moment. That’s why I've decided to come down here to check out any jobs lyin' around.

What do you specialize in?

Great Louisiana Cajun cuisine! I make a mean Louisiana Deviled Crab Cake, but that ain't the only thing I know how to toss up. I'm good – no, make that great with spicy stuff!

If you're looking for a job, I can offer you one!

Sure, bro, I'll join you if you gots a three-point-five deal goin' on here…

Well, I'm happy to inform you that the steakhouse you are standing in does in fact meet your expectations.

Get outta here! This is a three-point-five-star restaurant? Well, in that case, you gots a deal!

TYRONE BRINGS SOME MUCH-NEEDED *SOUL POWER* TO YOUR AMERICAN RESTAURANTS, ALONG WITH SOME MIGHTY TASTY AND SPICY FOOD!


I'm going to disappoint some people here, but unfortunately Restaurant Empire does not in fact have a "soul power" mechanic.

Anyway, Tyrone has joined the kitchen of Wagons Ho! And thank goodness, now I can add some more tables.



Much better! I figure our customers at the steakhouse are good salt-of-the-earth kind of people, so I hope they'll appreciate this football wall I made for them.



Wow, this is a new record, even for our abnormally greedy customers! This guest wants over $50,000 for a single recipe. I'll pay her, but this had better be a recipe for like, filet mignon with foie gras in a truffle sauce or something.



It wasn't. The quality rating is OK, but nothing special, the profit margin is poor, and since it's a Wellington recipe, it probably goes in the oven. I'll be generous and call this a mediocre recipe so I'll feel less stupid for paying $50,000 for it.



At least this recipe was only $12,000. This is a bad recipe, which is a shame, because it looks really cool on the plate! 44% quality rating is just completely insufficient at this point in the game, and that's after using special ingredients from our wholesalers.



I buy another recipe, this time at Le Palourde Chantante. Now, I know we have a bit of an unfortunate history with crepes in this business, but this recipe actually looks pretty good. The quality is mediocre, but the default profit margin is $20.96, which is just beautiful. As a non-competition recipe, this is definitely a good recipe.

Soon after this, I see a familiar face at the Hope and Anchor.



Hi Armand, great to see you again! As you probably know by now, I'm about to start my evaluation of your new seafood restaurant.


Now, this time I'm not sure we can rely on mafia muscle to "persuade" Secondo to give us a good review, so unfortunately we might actually have to try to serve a good meal.

But, Armand! You don't even offer Louisiana Deviled Crab Cakes! You do realise that I need to specifically review this recipe, and without it, I simply cannot write a review of any kind, even if your food might be world-class! I'll be back again, but see if you include the crab cakes in your menu next time around.


Wait, what? Oh, I guess Secondo just REFUSES to review you if you don't add the recipes you got from Tyrone! That actually reminds me that I haven't shown those off yet, so I guess that was useful. Thanks, Secondo!



Tyrone doesn't actually tell you what recipes he gives you, so I had to look through all our recipes to find them. Here's the first, the spicy tomato and corn soup (yes, I've added it to the corn restaurant). This is a really highly rated soup, definitely the best we can serve in our American restaurants. The profitability is bad, but that's to be expected from a soup. Still a good recipe.

Wait, is this just chicken broth with tomato, corn and cheese? That sounds disgusting. It's not even spicy, all it has is a bit of paprika.



Here's another one, the crispy oven-fried cod. Its good profit margin can't save it from its pathetic quality rating and the fact that it goes in the oven. A bad recipe.



This is the recipe that Secondo really wanted to try, and I can see why. This has a quality rating of 84%, which is just preposterously good! It makes barely any money at all, but this thing is going to be brutal in cooking competitions. And outside cooking competitions, we can fix the profitability by making a shitty lower-quality version for the plebs price-conscious consumer.



There we go. Using the worst possible substitute crab meat pushed the quality rating all the way down to 63%, but now the profit margin is around $10, which is OK. I'll add it to the menu of the Hope and Anchor in a bit, but now that I know that Secondo will refuse to review you until you add it, I'll stall for a couple of months to let our chefs get some more XP.

After a few months, I finally deign to put the deviled crab cakes on the menu.



Hi Armand, great to see you again! As you probably know by now, I'm about to start my evaluation of your new seafood restaurant.

Since Secondo is going to be reviewing us, I temporarily start cooking it with real crab to boost the recipe quality. Once we've served him, I'll go back to the terrible, cheap ersatz stuff.

I have just ordered – it's a good thing that you offer the Louisiana Crab Cakes recipe, or else I wouldn't be doing this review!

I'm still waiting for my food to arrive…!


I wait for him to finish, then talk to him again.

I just finished my meal…

And Armand, the food that I just had was absolutely fantastic! Rarely have I tasted such exquisite crab cakes as those you serve – rest assured the Hope & Anchor will be subject to a very fine review indeed.


Hooray, we did it!



To celebrate, I decide to invest in a facelift for the façade of Wagons Ho! All in good taste, of course.



Perfect.



And we've completed the mission! Aside from hiring Tyrone and impressing Secondo with our deviled crab cakes, we also had to bring Wagons Ho! to a 4 star rating and make $50,000 in monthly revenue at the Hope and Anchor. Assuming you're using sensible recipes at Wagons Ho! and your prices aren't too high, it should automatically climb to that rating after a couple of months as your chefs get experienced with the menu. Updating the exterior helps too. Making good revenue at the Hope and Anchor is a bit of a pain because it gets very low footfall, so I've been spending the maximum on advertisement for the Hope and Anchor the entire mission, and as long as your revenue-per-customer is pretty good you should be OK there too.

Next mission, Armand will be facing his greatest challenge yet, and we'll also be meeting a new character!



Thread poll: what décor should we have in The Hope and Anchor?

Tables E and F are identical except for the chairs, but E has better stats in gameplay terms. Only vote for tables A through D if you hate fun.

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.



The wall decoration options are pretty lame, just dead animals. No pictures, unfortunately, so unless you want to edit the back of that turtle, we can't really goonify these textures.



The selection of floor decorations is small, but look at that quality! Dolphins are the horse statues of the sea, and if we don't use the shark and Insaniquarium rugs, then like, what are we even doing here? Let me know if you have any ideas for the decoration of the restaurant!