Cook, Serve, Delicious! Review: A Great Cooking Game That *May* Break Your Fingers

If you’re a fan of cooking simulation games like us, chances are you may have tried games like the ever popular Diner Dash, Overcooked, and even Facebook games like Cafe World and Cafeland (ahh, the nostalgia…). While we love the other cooking simulators, Cook, Serve, Delicious! brings fun to the next level with its gamer-friendly interface.

We got CSD through Humble Bundle, installed it on Steam and we loved it ever since. We spent 50+ hours just frying, seasoning and stuff, and if not because we had quite a long hiatus from the gaming world, we might have spent waaay more than just that short fifty plus hours of our life.

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Before we dive right into our Cook, Serve, Delicious! review, a word of caution though: This game *may* break your fingers. Considered yourself fairly warned.

Jkjk.

Cook, Serve, Delicious!: Overview of The Game

For starters, this Steam game launches into an attractive dashboard with Career Mode and Battle Mode plus a couple of options for you to tweak your preferred settings. Career Mode is the main storyline, whereby you start off as a new chef trying to cook your way up to level up your restaurant from 1-star to a 5-star dining establishment inside the SherriSoda Tower.

It’s a typical leveling, except you are playing without ever seeing a character on screen since you’re going to be personally chopping and throwing stuff.

You have a choice between Standard Difficulty vs Extreme Difficulty, the difference being Extreme Difficulty ups the speed of customers coming in with orders compared to the slightly laidback Standard Difficulty gameplay.

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Cook, Serve, Delicious! Career Mode

In Career Mode, you start your business with $7500, and slowly work your way up to sell more food, upgrade existing recipes, and buy equipment to prepare food. Each day, you will be checking emails often from your managing dashboard as your source of info on the weather, when the safety inspection is due, recipe and equipment upgrades, and the random SherriSoda worker hype and disputes.

Also, through the email section, you will get to accept Crazy Dave’s bet to win some side cash, and also granted tickets to join in on another different cooking side bet. You may choose to accept or skip those bets, depending on your confidence to achieve the specified winning combos or rules.

You will also be notified of arranged “dates” whereby your potential date will let you know they will stop by your restaurant to eat a particular favorite food. Occasionally, you will also receive random weird emails in CSD that serve no purpose in progressing the game and funding requests for better equipment.

Cook, Serve, Delicious!: The Cooking Menu

What’s a cooking game without its yummylicious cooking menu? We love the visuals of each food that comes with their own pros and cons to help you decide if they do well on days the safety inspector visits, or when the weather forecast tells you it’s going to be a rainy day ahead.

The menu is divided into basic food and specialty food. You have fast food like pretzels, fried chicken, fries and sopapillas, and you have a selection of American, Italian and Asian food like burger, steak, pizza, lasagna, sushi and fried rice. You can change the key bindings to help you quickly execute the steps to cook your meals since the default keys may not be ideal if you want to win bets and challenges.

Cook, Serve, Delicious!: Gameplay

Cook, Serve, Delicious is easy to adapt to thanks to its simple yet straightforward instructions. At the start, the game will walk you through a tutorial so you know how to prep your food and serve to customers. You can also access the tutorial from your managing dashboard under Gallery/Tutorials.

It is helpful to understand the boosters and detractors for each food (it’s kinda like a pros and cons) to better adjust your menu of the day. Some foods may create more trash or dishes, which means you’ll have more chores to tend to for the day. And this isn’t going to go well if you have a safety inspector visiting – miss more than 2 chores and you’ll fail the safety inspection. Plan out your menu based on the emails you receive.

Also, you want to make sure your orders are perfect as much as possible – this will affect the buzz of your restaurant aka the number of orders coming in. This in turn affects your income of the day, which is rather crucial when you are just starting the business. You need money to purchase food and their upgrades, as well as equipment.

What We Love About Cook, Serve, Delicious!

One thing that separates Cook, Serve, Delicious from other cooking simulator games is that, this cooking game has a few chores similar to running a real restaurant. Apart from cooking delicious meals for your restaurant patrons, you need to juggle between orders to complete chores like throwing the trash, trapping rodents, washing dishes and flushing the toilet. On some days, you may even need to help the police with the robbery in your restaurant to catch the criminal. Sounds like a lot of stuff to run an eatery!

There are also fun side quests to spice up the game, such as the Cook, Serve, Delicious! catering events, Iron Cook Studios, Hungry Festivities challenges. As for Battle Mode, that really tests your prep skills and speed, and there’s a leaderboard plus achievements for the achievement freaks.

And did we mention you can do local co-op with CSD? If you have friends who own the game too, you can play together, which is really cool for a cooking simulator!

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Our Verdict

We heart Cook, Serve, Delicious!, and we certainly think it’s a nice game to chill in every now and then when you’re tired of games that take up a lot of grinding and time. It has a decent re-play value and it’s worth the money spent in our opinion.

Editor’s Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐