My Cafe: Recipes and Stories Tips, Cheats & Strategy Guide for Running a Successful Restaurant

My Cafe: Recipes and Stories is a new Android and iOS restaurant management game from Melsoft Games, and we’d say it’s a bit different from others of its kind. Although, there are a lot of features that it has in common with other restaurant or café management games, the key difference in here appears to be the storytelling – there is a reason, after all, why the second half of the game’s title is “Recipes and Stories.” Aside from cooking, buying furniture, and decorating your diner, bakery, or restaurant, you can also interact with your regular customers and choose responses that would dictate the flow of the story. Melsoft promises that each story in this game will be unique, so you’ll want to make the right choices in more than one way if you want your story to have a happy ending.

That’s the game in brief, and considering how complicated it may seem compared to other titles in its genre, we’ve decided to ease you in…and then some. Whether you’re a beginner, intermediate, or expert player, we believe you’ll find something you can use in this exclusive My Cafe: Recipes and Stories strategy guide. Here we shall be covering all manner of general tips and tricks, but as we always do, we’re going to start from the very beginning and fill you in on the basics.

1. Do The Serving Yourself

In this game, the serving will mostly be done by your in-game friend and top employee Ann, as well as the employees you hire for your restaurant. But don’t just stand there and let them do all the dirty work; you can help them out as well and do the serving yourself. Tap on a customer, press the “What would you like to order” button, take note of their order, and off you go.

You can prepare their food and drinks, and if you happen to forget a recipe, you can tap on the tea cup icon found on the bottom right of your screen to view the recipe list. After you’ve prepared their order, you can then tap on that same customer and press the “Here’s your order!” button in order to serve them. Don’t be useless just because you’re the boss – if business is picking up, then go ahead and serve some customers.

2. How Else Can You Be Of Help When Serving?

That’s the basic element of serving customers in the game, but you can also help Ann and the rest of your staff by tapping on machines and serving your customers drinks. As AI-controlled characters will have to wait until a machine works in order to make drinks, you might want to jump into the action and speed them up, thus allowing everyone to serve customers quickly and efficiently. Tap on empty machines while your crew serves customers, and create drinks for customers who may be coming in, and be sure that all those machines are working.

3. More Servers Means Faster Service

If you want to earn tons of profit in the game, you’ll want to have enough servers on deck so you can speed up your service. Leveling up brings a new customer to your café, and if you’re not playing the game, your servers will help Ann as she serves up your customers’ orders. And as you keep on serving customers quickly, your profits will rise. Listen to when Ann tells you that a new server can be hired, and don’t forget to buy a service table (found under Catalog > Furniture) in order to proceed with the hiring process. Tap on the Hire button when you see a server you want to add to your list of employees, and prioritize skills ahead of anything else. Still, don’t overspend on hiring servers, and take a good look at their price tags, as well as their skills. And if you aren’t satisfied with the current lineup of servers, you can reroll for a new list in about an hour’s time.

4. Basics On Employee Skills

You will notice an up arrow above Ann’s head when she levels up – tap on her, and tap on the “Tell Me About Your Skills” button so you can view the available skills to train. Her particular skills are Daily Simple Gift, All Items Prices, and Speed, though the skills of other restaurant employees may differ. Tap on a worker’s skill icons and focus on their strengths when it comes to those upgrades so you can earn more profit from your restaurant. Take note that you can only upgrade one of three skills when an employee levels up, so make sure you’re making the right decision.

5. Upgrade Ann’s All Items Prices First

We mentioned Ann’s skills above, and considering she is your most valuable employee, you’ll want to be very sure you’re upgrading the right skill of hers. Our suggestion is that you work on the All Items Prices skills, as it puts a premium on the price of all items being sold in your café. For example, upgrading to Level 1 will increase all item prices by 6 percent, and once you’re at level 10, any items can be raised by 30 percent.

After upgrading Ann’s skill accordingly, you can then set new prices for unlocked items, though you should try to avoid setting the prices too high; when selecting price increases, stop when you see the color is dark green, and do not let it get to yellow. Once an item’s price in yellow, customers will tend to avoid that item, simply because it’s out of their everyday budget.

6. Upgrade Daily Simple Gift For…Well, More Gifts

The next skill you should upgrade for Ann would be Daily Simple Gift. If you upgrade this skill to Level 1, you’ll get one simple gift per day. Once you’ve got her at Level 5, you’ll get two gifts per day, and when she’s at Level 10, you’ll get 3 gifts per day. So what’s in the Simple Gift? These may include spices, which you can add to your drinks; after that, you can sell the finished product to customers at a higher price.

7. Get Special Spices, Here’s How

Special spices, for starters, are the condiment you would need in order to make special recipes. Add some spice to a drink or another food item, and you’ll be cooking up an item that costs a lot of money; sometimes, the prices may be far more premium than what one would normally expect. But how do you get them anyway? The first thing to do, so you can access the game’s rare spices, is to build a stand and buy a spice box. That would allow you to collect and keep any spices you get via the methods we will be telling you below.

One of the easiest ways to get special spices is to log in to the game every day, or get them as a daily gift. We explained that in the last tip, stressing that after you’ve upgraded Ann’s price-related skill, you can then move on to her gift-related skill. More daily gifts means more chances of getting special spices! Additionally, you can order the spices via phone, but that can only be done by Level 6 onward, where you unlock the phone. (As an aside, this also allows you to accept takeout orders.) Additionally, you can get some spices from customers; be social, talk to your customers regularly, and who knows, they just might reward you in the form of spices. Normally, it’s Koffsky and Mary who would be most likely to give you spices.

8. Ask Customers First If They Want That Something Special

Special items, as we hinted in the earlier tips, cost much more than you common, regular items. They could burn a hole through your wallet in real life, and in-game. So before you serve a special item (and make one by adding some special spice to it), you should ask the customers whether they want “something special.” They will then tell you a certain recipe with a certain spice, and how much they’re willing to pay for the meal.

9. Decorating Your Café – What Should You Do To Profit From It?

We’ve covered a lot of food-related and skill-related tips, but we shall now move on to another detailed topic we believe you should be familiar with – furniture. You can earn bonus tips from customers through the decorations you use for your café, and if you’re not sure what kind of furniture to use, you can pick up the hints your customers will drop through their conversations. As such, pay close attention to the stuff they say.

Aside from being cognizant of what your customers are saying, you should also try to decorate your café in one style, e.g. English, Chinese, French, or Italian. So if you’ve got a mishmash of English and French furniture in your café, you won’t earn as much tips as you would had you gone with an all-Chinese approach, for instance.

10. Pay Attention To Those Conversations

Speaking of conversations with customers, we said earlier that you should pay close attention. But what if your attention span was just too short? Well, you can always tap on the book icon (found on the top left of your screen) if you need to revisit conversations, may they be new ones or old ones. You will also see avatars for your customers, which you can tap on in order to get some insight on their favorite recipes or decoration themes, or maybe on the gossip they shared.

But not all conversations are made up of idle chatter. You may notice that there are some sentences that end with a diamond icon. These are actually quests, which you can then complete in order to get a free gem, which is the game’s premium form of currency.

11. Know What Your Customers Can Do

One great thing about My Cafe: Recipes and Stories is the fact that all the characters have their own personalities and characteristics. That means they can help you in their own unique ways. For example, you can get decoration tips from Margaret, as well as from Café and Restaurant Society chairman Fernando, who will also reward you with VIP points if you talk to him about decorations. Then you’ve also got Koffsky, who may sometimes give you spices or share new recipes. You can also earn a free diamond, or maybe a couple, by meeting your customers’ requirements and wants.