How "Cook, Serve, Delicious!" Made Me a Better Line Cook
“Cook, Serve, Delicious!” is a game released on Steam in 2013, where you play as the head chef, janitor, wait staff, and only cook at a restaurant inside of an office building. You choose your menu, buy new equipment to prepare more expensive and therefore more profitable dishes, and also get robbed every now and then. I had first heard of the game after Ryan Davis had passed. He was a huge fan of the game, and has a burger in the game named after him (meat, bacon, 2 slices of cheese, and tomatoes)! I’ve been a cook my whole life, working in a kitchen since I was 16, and a huge Giant bomb fan. I just ate it up.
A huge part of Cook, Serve, Delicious! is timing out when you “fire” (forgive my kitchen speak, it’s baked in at this point) each order, timing it out so that when your burger is done being cooked, you’re not too busy popping open a bottle of wine, or frying some french fries. While you’re cooking, random janitorial tasks pop up, throwing wrenches in your carefully planned task list, causing you to memorize the exact command to do the dishes as quickly as possible or throw all these bags of trash into the dumpster so you can get back to making as much money as possible. There’s a groove you’ll hit when you start to really get a feel for how long things to take, and you start timing out your fires to be busy pretty much nonstop in a way that, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, feels like Work (my work, I mean. (line cook)).
Timing out your fires and memorizing how long it takes to cook a burger to a perfect medium is what separates the good line cooks and the bad line cooks. For instance, where I work right now, I work the flat top grill. That means I make all the hash browns, burgers, prime rib, pancakes, french toast, meatloaf, all the things that your traditional diner carries and sells So Much. Now, I know, since I do it all day about 4 days a week, that the burger, at 400°, takes about a minute or two on one side, and about a minute and a half on the other side to hit a perfect medium, while our open face prime rib sandwich only takes about 30-45 seconds on each side to hit that perfect mid-rare you NEED prime rib to hit for maximum flavor. So if I get a ticket that has 2 burgers and an open face prime rib sandwich, I know I can throw on the burgers, and after the first flip, throw the prime rib on, so they both get plated at roughly the same time. This is crucial to the job, that your food comes out hot, at the same time, and in a timely fashion. Cook, Serve, Delicious! does a great job of distilling that in your head. The better you time your food, sending out perfect orders, the more your customers tip! In classic video game form, The Numbers Get Bigger and you want the numbers to get e v e n b i g g e r.
When I first got into the restaurant business, I got easily overwhelmed at the sheer volume of tickets, and how much work goes into each item, but what I really learned from CSD! is every ticket is made up of multiple steps, easy to break down and tackle individually. To bring back an older ticket analogy, say I have a ticket with a burger and an open face prime rib sandwich. You can break it down into a little routine with about 4 steps each. Breaking a task into smaller, more achievable tasks is a super easy and super common way to get over getting overwhelmed. CSD! is all about keeping your head as the lunch and dinner rushes come in, everyone ordering at once, maybe in the middle of you cleaning up some dishes, or taking the trash out. Customers don’t wait for nothing. Customers don’t care. You gotta prove it to them that you’re worthy of their respect (respect given via tips).
In an ironic turn, for the same reasons I absolutely adore CSD! I also can’t play for too long at any point. It’s a great simulation of my daily duties as a line cook, maybe too great. The last thing I want to do after a long shift is to sit down at my computer and play a fantasy version of my own job. That said, there is also a robbery mechanic in CSD! where you get robbed and you have to take some time off of cooking to describe your thief to a police officer. That does not happen very often if at all to me in this industry.
