Part 1: Treize à Table
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 fuck 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.