Part 6: My account password is "password"
Episode 5: My account password is "password"
Armand, that was not bad. You have demonstrated, like your uncle, to have both the talent to cook and to administer to a restaurant's needs and realities.
Can I ask you some questions? Shoot. Not literally, but go ahead. Why did you pull out of the restaurant business? OmniFood! That's why. These no-good rats! These guys are sneakier in their industry than I am in mine! I made the big mistake before of relying on chefs with passion. Those nuts always want the best ingredients. Nuts! This restaurant thing is a business, you know? Stay outta the red! That's why I need to see you perform well economically, Armand. I cannot afford to lose this opportunity again. You stay in the black, and I supply the financing. Why are you back in the restaurant business? First of all, I like the food. I like the atmosphere. Ah, what's the point? The reason used to be those, but now it's really because I hate OmniFood! I want revenge! I want to see them topple, that's why! Never mind… . . . So, regarding that loan… You mean the investment. You still interested? Yes! Alright then, here's the money.THE DON HAS GIVEN YOU A LUMP SUM OF $250,000 FOR EXPANSION PURPOSES – PUT IT TO GOOD USE!
But now, I do expect that some of my demands are met. Um… Can I back out now? Nope, you gave me the word. That's as good as a contract back in Sicilia. Capite? [sic] Can't it wait? I'm just 250 grand richer! Let me revel in my momentary glory! Money does not reproduce by itself, Armand. You need to put it to productive use. Now are you ready for my demands? What are these demands? As I am a man of my word, I'll start you off easy. This is what I want from you.THE DON HAS GIVEN YOU THE LOCATION OF HIS ABANDONED RESTAURANT.
That's the location of La Cosa Nostra – a restaurant of mine. It's completely abandoned. This guy I used to deal with copped out on me and ran off to LA, leaving me high and dry with my losses. Anyways, I want you to establish it for me. Get it up and running again. I expect to see a monthly revenue of $60,000 and a customer satisfaction rating of at least 50%, and you have six long months to do it. But, Don, I'm not an Italian chef! How can I prepare Italian food? Hmmm. Good point you have there, Armand. Tell you what: I'll get in touch with my brother. His son is studying to become a chef in Verona. I'll talk him into taking an internship with you. How's that sound? Great! So, when can I expect him to arrive? I'll have him catch the next plane over. How's that sound? Excellent, Don! Thanks for helping me out, Don… Sure thing, Armand. As long as we both prosper in the long run… OK, then, off I go. Be seeing you soon! You bring back results and you'll get results. Remember what we talked about. Keep the customer satisfaction rating above 50% and net $60,000 in monthly revenue. Make me – us rich!So the Cosa Nostra mafia set up an Italian restaurant as a front for their illegal activities, but then they actually named the restaurant "La Cosa Nostra"?
"Hey, Vinny, I was just thinking – if we name the restaurant La Cosa Nostra and put up this big sign saying 'LA COSA NOSTRA', won't the cops suspect that this is a front for La Cosa Nostra?"
"Tommy, you stupid, is reverse psychology! The cops KNOW we're trying to disguise our front business, so if we name it 'La Cosa Nostra', it'll be the last place they look!"
So this is it: La Cosa Nostra! What this picture might not properly communicate is that this restaurant is HUGE. The ground floor alone is twice as big as all of Treize à Table. We will never have any reason to expand to the top floor, this restaurant is enormous. So why did Don Corleone have trouble with this place?
Well, one issue is that in all the months that the Don and his previous manager were operating it, this giant restaurant didn't have any restrooms. I know that the Don is all about the money, but customers get so whiny about things like this, so I guess I'll have to sort it out.
Normally I would ask you guys to help with the design, but honestly, there's not a lot to restrooms in Restaurant Empire. Stalls, sinks, done. I consider going for
Since the restaurant is so big, you are actually going to lose significant amounts of time waiting for your servers to go back and forth between the tables and the kitchen if you keep the kitchen in its default location. Instead, I downsize the kitchen and move it to the middle of the restaurant so our servers won't have to walk as far.
This is the default look of our menu. To me, this is the worst thing that Armand has ever done – worse than the crepes with a hundred teaspoons of cinnamon. Can you imagine a man – nay, a child – walking into this big Italian restaurant, sitting down at a table, opening this festive pizza-themed menu and finding out that we do not have a SINGLE pizza recipe? Just oily pork, wine and misery?
I put down some temporary tables and open the restaurant. Notice how, even with pretty inefficient use of the space, the tables our one chef can realistically support only fill about a quarter of one floor of the restaurant? I seriously have no idea what the game expects you to do with all this space.
We have our first customer, Diana Aneloni! She was already leaving when I went to check up on her. She just ordered a coffee, then left immediately after being served. I like to think she felt insulted by our shamefully pizza-less menu.
Back at Treize à Table, a customer calls Armand over and complains about the way that we're preparing the Crepes Marcie. Personally, I don't know what he could possibly be complaining about.
This is something we haven't seen before, the rare "self-scam" phenomenon. This customer is asking us for a recipe, and she's willing to pay $4,914 for it. Now, I have absolutely no idea what the consequences of agreeing to this is – if it will somehow strengthen our rivals, if it will siphon away customers from our restaurants, or, hell, if it does absolutely nothing. However, I do know that our customers always offer us around $5,000 for our recipes while they demand around $15,000 when they're selling them to us. Therefore, out of a combination of paranoia and spite, I always refuse these offers no matter what kind of sob story our customers come up with. Get your dirty hands off our incredibly sparse Italian recipe book!
The month ends, and of course we… Oh, wait, we failed.
Although we met the revenue target, the Don insisted that we achieve a 50% average satisfaction rating. This sounds like we need to make sure 50% of our guests are satisfied with their meals, but that's not strictly true. Every guest will build up a "satisfaction" score during their stay, and when they leave the restaurant their degree of satisfaction will be a number between 0% and 100%. This is the number we need to fix.
This info panel shows the dishes that our guest Signor Michele Buse ordered for his lunch. Next to each dish is a star rating, showing the actual quality of what we served him, determined by recipe quality, ingredient quality and our chef's skill. Each dish was given two stars, which means a quality rating of about 40%-50%.
When each guest enters the restaurant, he or she will form a quality expectation based on our general price level. This customer, Elena Bianchi, was expecting three star food when she entered the restaurant, but what we actually served her was two-and-a-half star food. When you serve a customer worse food than they're expecting, their satisfaction will go down. If you serve them better food than they're expecting, their satisfaction goes up. Additionally, satisfaction will go down if guests have any specific complaints (usually totally frivolous things like "I'm the driver, why does this restaurant serve nothing but wine?" or "I've been here for an hour, where's my food?")
Since we need to raise our satisfaction rating, we have two options:
1) Lower our prices so our customers' quality expectations will be lower.
2) Improve the quality of our food.
Of course, since lowering our prices IS NOT AN OPTION, what we need to do is increase the quality of our dishes. This happens slowly on its own as our chefs become better at their work, and since we were just 4% below the goal, I expect we'll win the mission in a month or two even if we don't make any changes.
A customer offers us a new recipe, the cold spaghetti salad. This wouldn't normally be very good, but we only have two other Italian appetizers, and they're both low quality with terrible profit margins, so this recipe is a godsend. In the current circumstances, this is a good recipe, and I add it to the menu.
Sure enough, two months later, we make it! In fact, not only do we meet the Don's requirements, but La Cosa Nostra has also become highly profitable. Who knew that getting involved with organised crime would be so lucrative! Next time, we'll see what the Don has to say about our performance, and hopefully we'll also meet another ridiculous cultural stereotype.
Now for the good part! I'll need you guys to help me decide on the décor for La Cosa Nostra. First off, the decorations. The art style for Italian restaurants is retro advertisement posters. This is good for our purposes, because they should be even easier to edit than the paintings. Aside from the posters, we can also put up lyres, mirrors and a big-ass gondola, which I'm tempted to say is non-negotiable. I really want that big gondola.
These are the floor-mounted decorations. I have to admit, I kind of dig those horse statues.
These are the options for the walls, floor and tables.
Thread poll: what décor should we have in La Cosa Nostra?
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. Also, let me know if you want me to add any of the floor or wall decorations.