Part 4: Welcome to Friday Night Supper Slam

Episode 3: Welcome to Friday Night Supper Slam



Armand! I was just going to see you!

Really? What about?

Did you know that the French Local Cooking Competition is on?

YOU CAN NOW ENTER THE FRENCH LOCAL COOKING COMPETITION!

What are the cooking competition requirements?

You can find out at the stadium, but I can tell you what I know: This is more of a *beginners' contest*, so they will accept any dish that is French. Oh, and there's always the registration fee. For this contest, it will be $1000.

That sounds easy enough! I can use any French recipe, then?

For this contest, yes. But remember that this is only the first competition. Other ones will be considerably more difficult to enter, and will demand better recipes than those you have available, so keep that in mind.

Great! So, where do I enter the cooking competition?

Well, just look up the Stade de la Grande Cuisine.

Thanks, uncle! I'm going to try to win this one!

I'm sure you can! Just remember to always use the very best ingredients!

OK, I'll be going now! See you soon, uncle!

Next time I see you, I hope it's with the trophy!



It's finally time to test our cooking chops in deadly culinary combat against other chefs! Our first cooking competition will take place at the Stade de la Grande Cuisine, which cannot be viewed from the front because it's been placed right up against the level boundary. :gamedesign:



The rules for the competition are simple: three chefs enter, one chef leaves! Any French recipe will do, and we stand to win a $10,000 prize, as well as the pleasure of crushing our enemies, hearing the lamentation of their women etc.

Let's do it! Can Armand best the French local cooking competition?



No, he can't!

OK, that was actually a tactical retreat. Now that we've lost our first attempt at the cooking competition, let's go whine to uncle Michel.



Hi uncle!

Hello, Armand, whatever brings you here?

Uncle, my recipes are appalling… care to take a look at them and tell me what you think?

Well, let's see your recipe book, then…

Mmh. Uh – huh… Yes… Yes… YES!

There's nothing wrong with your recipes. Nothing, Armand! They are alright the way they are. But, did you ever notice that certain ingredients really bring out the flavour in a recipe?

Yes…

Well, your recipes are merely OK – nothing exceptional. Make a recipe exceptional by adding in optional ingredients. The recipe's true colors – er, flavors, rather, will give your recipe that extra boost..

UNCLE MICHEL GIVES YOU A REVISED VERSION OF THE MIXED CASSEROLE RECIPE – NOW YOUR MIXED CASSEROLE IS COMPLETE!

There! The Mixed Casserole of Pork was one of my dear mère's favorites. This is one recipe that I really, truly know! I had to make this for her all the time, and really *tweaked* it to perfection! This is a recipe that should be good enough to trounce any that will be in the local cooking contest!

I'll be leaving now. I'm going to try to win the cooking contest!

Good luck!

All right! Michel gives our best recipe a little boost. Let's see what he's added.



At a 67% rating, the mixed casserole of pork is now way ahead of any of our other recipes. Michel did this by adding four optional ingredients: chives, nutmeg, oregano and salt. Normally we get tips about optional ingredients by bribing our customers, but this time Michel did us a solid and just gave us four at once.

I'm also a little concerned that Armand, a professional chef, needed his uncle to tell him to put salt in his food, but let that rest. For now, let's do the cooking competition for real!



Welcome to the cooking arena! In the world of Restaurant Empire, cooking is apparently a really big deal, because they build huge stadia and special cooking arenas to host cooking competitions all over the world.



Armand enters to the roar of the crowd! He was defeated once, but like his terrible French apple tart, you can't keep down destiny!



His first opponent enters, a Monsieur Peter Flint, who does some grandstanding for the audience.



Contestant number three, Monsieur Evariste Bartolomé. The crowd loves it!



Naturally, we'll be entering with our new mixed casserole of pork. In the top left, you see three numbers: 34%, 67% and 58%. The 34% shows Armand's personal skill at cooking this particular recipe, a pretty unimpressive 34%. 67% is the inherent quality of the recipe, and 58% is the final skill- and recipe-weighted quality of the dish.



The game is on, and Armand gets to work! While Armand cooks, we'll be able to help him increase that 58% dish quality by completing difficult cooking minigames.



CAN YOU CLICK THE NUMBERS FROM ONE TO SIX IN ORDER!



CLICK THE BUTTON WHEN THE YELLOW DOT IS OVER THE BULLSEYE! HURRY!



DO YOU KNOW THE ALPHABET! YOU BETTER IF YOU EXPECT TO BE A MASTER CHEF!



CAN YOU CLICK A RED BUTTON AND PRAY THAT THE DELAYED YELLOW BAR MOVES INTO THE CENTRE!



You have very little time to do the minigames, but if you're very efficient about it, the game will eventually cut you off from doing any more. We've raised Armand's dish quality to 62%. But will that be enough to defeat the other chefs?



Yup. In fact, the runner-up's dish was only quality 55, so we could have done nothing at all and still won with the recipe's starting quality of 58. This contest is pretty easy now that we have Michel's gamebreaking mixed casserole.



Victory!



And we get prizes for our efforts! A gold medal, a new recipe and a bunch of money that we'll soon be handing over to our incredibly greedy customers. But for now, we are victorious!

For anyone who's interested in seeing INTENSE MINIGAME ACTION, I've recorded a video of me playing through it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZWKpgtNM64



Our prize recipe is the Fish Wellington. This looks fantastic on the surface. Its rating of 66% is just one point below Armand's improved Mixed Casserole of Pork, and its profitability is even better, at $13.92. Unfortunately, it goes in the oven, and thus takes way too long to cook to be economical. Normally, that'd automatically make it a bad recipe, but the quality of it is just so good that I'd say that this is a mediocre recipe. We can take it or leave it.

For some reason, the game lets you enter the French cooking contest a second time in this mission for a chance to win another recipe. I enter again with Armand's ridiculously good mixed casserole and we win…



…carbonara??



Yes, our prize for winning the French cooking contest again is that classic French recipe, spaghetti carbonara. Not only is carbonara probably the last thing I would think of if asked to think of a classic French recipe, it's also really, really bad in gameplay terms. 36% quality and a paltry profit margin, this is definitely a bad recipe. But even though it's a bad recipe, could it be… a good omen?



For now, though, let's return to Treize à Table, where a few changes have been made.



First off, as a service to our customers, we're going to help them work up an appetite by navigating a statue-and-wine rack obstacle course in order to actually reach their tables on the newly redecorated second floor.



The second floor has been redecorated in the fashionable goono-revolutionary style, featuring beautiful art to remind our guests of their eternal duty to the revolution.



ultrafilter requested at least one picture of Napoleon, so I went with this picture from the base game labelled "The Charge at Waterloo". I figured this would piss off both Art Goons and History Goons, as not only is this a very famous painting whose actual title is "Napoleon Crossing the Alps" (which are hundreds of miles from Waterloo), Napoleon also did not lead the famous cavalry charge at Waterloo, which was actually led by Michel Ney.

Why did the game developers make up a blatantly incorrect title for this picture when the website they took the picture from probably had it listed under its correct title?





Our objectives this time around are not difficult at all: beat the cooking contest, which we've already done, and make a profit of $12,000, which is less than a third of what we made last month. Instead of focusing on our objectives, I would like to express my sympathies to whoever gets seated at the table to the right of the objectives box, right under the picture of the guillotine execution. Revolution isn't always pretty, comrades!

I add people's requests to our menu, which now appallingly includes both coffee and soda instead of forcing everyone to drink overpriced wine. We're getting soft!

Breakfast

Baked eggs with cheese - $5.40 ($1.43 net)

Appetizers

Fried duck liver with asparagus tips - $18.20 ($12.34 net)
Poached salmon with truffles and shrimp - $17.60 ($11.52 net)

Soups

Cream of asparagus soup - $5.60 ($1.91 net)

Mains

Eggplant, zucchini, red pepper and parmesan torte - $16.00 ($11.95 net)
Mixed casserole of pork - $19.20 ($12.59 net)
Gratineed chicken in cream sauce - $16.40 ($9.09 net)

Desserts

Chocolate tart - $6.00 ($4.74 net)
French apple tart - $5.80 ($5.00 net)
Strawberries jubilee - $5.60 ($3.46 net)
Crepes marcie - $6.40 ($4.97 net)

Drinks

White wine - $15.40 ($12.60 net)
Red wine - $11.25 ($8.75 net)
Soft drink - $2.31 ($1.66 net)
Coffee - $2.56 ($1.46 net)



I have to admit, I am really surprised that guests are successfully navigating our tower defence-style wine racks. I expected them to totally flip out and just leave the restaurant immediately.



Ibticem Gauthier (which I'm almost positive is not a real French name) is the first guest of the day to try to scam us out of our prize money. From now on, I'll only show these off if the guests offer us something new and interesting, or they're just exceptionally rude like this one.

As the day draws to a close, we're going to get our results for the day. Unfortunately, structuring our restaurant so bizarrely and substantially increasing our maintenance costs with those tapestries and the giant wine racks and statues is going to negatively affect our result a bit, but we should still be able to make the objective.



Or at least that's what I would expect, but actually we made even greater profits and revenues this month than the last one, and we served more courses on time. What?

So there are at least three reasons we did so well this mission:

1) The way the game calculates profit and revenue is by multiplying your daily results by the number of days in the month. Last month was February, with 28 days, and this month was March, with 31 days.

2) Winning the cooking competition increases Armand's reputation, bringing in more customers to his restaurant. Additionally, winning a contest with a recipe makes that particular recipe more popular with customers, so it's a good idea to try to win contests with a high-margin recipe like the mixed casserole as we did.

3) Adding coffee to the menu doesn't actually reduce wine sales. People will generally order wine with their appetizers and mains, then order a coffee for their dessert.

That was a pretty big update, but a lot happened this mission. We now have a beautiful restaurant and we're the French cooking champions! But our innocent little story's about to take a sinister turn, as Armand will be meeting some dangerous new friends in the next mission.