Create and manage your dream restaurant! Menus, purchasing, décor, staff, equipment, customers… and don't forget the actual cooking! Experience the daily life of a restaurateur and earn your stars from the Michelin Guide.
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I was NOT expecting this level of commitment/compromise when I walked in for my first culinary lesson, nor when I started working in restaurants, nor when I downloaded this game (that is grotesquely similar to how a real restaurant works) just to see what it is about. It is funny that these three experiences sucked me in so abruptly that I found myself obliged to hurry to get things done and learn everything as fast as I could.
The kitchen experience blows me away, always will, and when I say kitchen I don’t mean only the cooking itself, I mean the physical kitchen, this white, bright, full of chemistry and mysterious micro explosions, hyper sanitized and simultaneously desperately messy space - the underlying philosophy of the whole place is to physically contain any type of chaos, be it contamination, disorganization, fire (literally and figuratively), so the layout design of every restaurant kitchen tries to emulate this accident-proof room where everything has a correct place, position, moment, which backfires in being a tense, explosive, often careless experience. This dynamic is cleverly translated in chronometers and queue lines, step by step, conciliating tasks - a pretty amazing job imo.
And of course, the cooking, maybe as a spiritual activity, as in connecting with ancestors and humanity through the smells and textures and the (many) feelings that I feel for food, maybe as a profound cultural deep dive, understanding the many ways to build even the most simple and classic recipes - and why their traditional blueprint work so well in the first place - maybe as an art form even, an expression from the soul of the deep abstract desires of not survival but living, and also an obvious scientific exploration, because it is awesome and scary how far we got from picking fruits from a tree to cultivating yeast and then having the resources/the control over the land/time to prepare enormous feasts for many people to enjoy together abundantly, to baking pink biscuits and using liquid nitrogen to build beautiful shapes of taste. And the restaurant aspect of it is a complex manifestation of the crave for oneness, the want to be together, to provide, to share, and to love, which is: though destructive and passionate and sometimes too much of a proud control freak, it only wants you well served and happily digesting.
Chef Life is careful with every detail of this bittersweet, humane infatuation.
It also has a wholesome approach, offering the challenge to rush and memorize every recipe and focus on the mise en place to get the michelin star (30+ hours in and still didn’t) or if you want to play it laid back, unpressured, creatively, it is also an option. I was impressed with these accessibility options, makes the whole experience so beautifully welcoming.
The kitchen experience blows me away, always will, and when I say kitchen I don’t mean only the cooking itself, I mean the physical kitchen, this white, bright, full of chemistry and mysterious micro explosions, hyper sanitized and simultaneously desperately messy space - the underlying philosophy of the whole place is to physically contain any type of chaos, be it contamination, disorganization, fire (literally and figuratively), so the layout design of every restaurant kitchen tries to emulate this accident-proof room where everything has a correct place, position, moment, which backfires in being a tense, explosive, often careless experience. This dynamic is cleverly translated in chronometers and queue lines, step by step, conciliating tasks - a pretty amazing job imo.
And of course, the cooking, maybe as a spiritual activity, as in connecting with ancestors and humanity through the smells and textures and the (many) feelings that I feel for food, maybe as a profound cultural deep dive, understanding the many ways to build even the most simple and classic recipes - and why their traditional blueprint work so well in the first place - maybe as an art form even, an expression from the soul of the deep abstract desires of not survival but living, and also an obvious scientific exploration, because it is awesome and scary how far we got from picking fruits from a tree to cultivating yeast and then having the resources/the control over the land/time to prepare enormous feasts for many people to enjoy together abundantly, to baking pink biscuits and using liquid nitrogen to build beautiful shapes of taste. And the restaurant aspect of it is a complex manifestation of the crave for oneness, the want to be together, to provide, to share, and to love, which is: though destructive and passionate and sometimes too much of a proud control freak, it only wants you well served and happily digesting.
Chef Life is careful with every detail of this bittersweet, humane infatuation.
It also has a wholesome approach, offering the challenge to rush and memorize every recipe and focus on the mise en place to get the michelin star (30+ hours in and still didn’t) or if you want to play it laid back, unpressured, creatively, it is also an option. I was impressed with these accessibility options, makes the whole experience so beautifully welcoming.
Qui veut mes beaux croque monsieur gastronomiques ?
Clunky controls, weird graphics, and an incredibly complex and unsatisfying gameplay loop amount to a game I had to put down. I'm glad I checked this out for free from my library, because I'd be upset if I paid for it.
trash