Restaurant City

Restaurant City is a game on Facebook. If you are not a Facebook user or are uninterested in games there, you will probably not want to read any further.

Some time ago, a friend sent me an invitation to play, and I tried it for a little while and thought it was boring and hard to figure out, so I gave up, leaving my restaurant closed. (In the game, you run a restaurant, staffing, decorating and creating menus.) Recently a friend who is an active player sent me a request, and I looked at the game again and found it greatly improved. What's more, the game's forums now have a series of guides that explain fairly clearly what's going on and how to play, which helped a lot.

So I've been playing more frequently. In some ways, it does parallel real-world restaurant management ... complaining customers, inadequate staff, expensive supplies, overflowing toilets.... It can be interesting to poke around and see how others have arranged their restaurants. There's also a daily food quiz that tests your knowledge, usually pretty simple, but once or twice a question has caught me.

The big drawback is that it's a flash game and uses a lot of CPU power. Unlike some other Facebook games, though, it does have the advantage that you can close your restaurant and go away and come back to it without suffering (unlike Farmville, where you have to worry about crops rotting).

Like all of these social-network games, the more connections you have who are playing, the more fun it is. It occurred to me that with all the people on LTHForum, there must be some others who are playing. So I thought we might trade some tips and tricks.

And if any LTH Restaurant City players are looking to add another player to their list, feel free to send me a friend request (please send a note so that I know who you are).

Here's a tip: If you try RC and don't like it, you can, of course, block the application. However, for the sake of other players, before you do that, please unlock all your ingredients for trading and rename your restaurant to "Closed" because the restaurant will remain after you're no longer playing and that way those who drop in after you've abandoned it will know not to bother sending you gifts and requests.

A tip for active players: Put all your friends who are playing RC into a friend list. That way you can easily check their feeds to see what they're giving away.

Farmville goes to town.

I gather there is now an urban counterpart to Farmville called Cityville.

Restaurant City is a Playfish game, rather than Xynga (the Farmville folks). It's got considerably more motion than Farmville, and I sometimes find it rather hypnotic watching all the little cartoon customers scurry in to eat at the restaurant, the chefs shaking their pans and the servers bustling around. It's all very cute. Like a cartoon ant farm.

From a culinary standpoint, the game is on one hand very sophisticated and on the other kind of dumb. Among the things a player does is collect ingredients to make various dishes. These are quite ethnically diverse, including such items as lamb biryani, chicken korma and duck confit. Yet biscotti are listed among the appetizers and the recipe for a Shirley Temple calls for strawberries.

The decision-making is interesting. Do you spend money on ingredients or furnishings? Hire a cook or a waiter? Fix the toilets yourself or devote limited staffing resources to a janitor? What hours should you keep open? As I said above, some things are very much like real-world restaurateuring.

Others are not. Such as feeding the reindeer.

A few more comments on the world of virtual restaurateuring.

I was amused to note, during a brief spell of serving (virtual) lobster, that the customers ate the crustaceans shells and all but left behind the butter. (My current menu is vegan, an accident of the ingredients I happened to collect. I hope to be adding chicken satay, soon.)

In a current marketing scheme that seems both clever and insidious, and perhaps offers insights into real-world beverage markets, players who acquire a certain number of Coca-Cola bottles receive a free (virtual) Coke machine, which offers a minor improvement on beverage service. More importantly, every Coke served -- in iconic Coca-Cola cartoon glassware displaying the logo -- generates 1.5 times the revenue of other beverages.

So thousands of gamers will not only be displaying the distinctive red-and-white Coke machines but also serving Coke as their only (virtual) beverage as they strive to rack up points and game coins.

Values in the game shift, but currently Coca-Cola is worth more than saffron.

After months of using Restaurant City, I got bored and switched to Cafe World. I also play Baking Life. It is cool to manage your own restaurant, plan your dishes to serve, the interior and exterior, and everything about it. I wish my restaurant would be real one day.