My Hotpot Story Guide: Tips, Tricks & Strategies to Manage Your Own Chinese Restaurant

My Hotpot Story is a simulation game published by Subzero7, where you are in charge of a budding hotpot restaurant. After buying it from the previous owner, Master Wen, you start out seating small groups for lunch and gradually work up your way to hosting all sorts of customers. Families, friends, and business colleagues are just a sample of who you will serve in My Hotpot Story.

In this simulation of Chinese cuisine, you take your customers’ orders of a select broth and various dishes to go with it. As you expand your restaurant, you purchase new facilities and furniture to meet up with customer demands, while hiring employees to deal with various tasks as you survey your restaurant. All the while, you gather and refine resources to come up with new broths and dishes alike, giving your customers a greater selection of choices and your restaurant a greater source of income.

My Hotpot Story has elements of idle games as you go on, as progressing to reach the next set of milestones gets longer and longer. Our guide will show you how to get your new restaurant up in working order, and how to make that waiting a little less boring. Stay with us to see what My Hotpot Story has to serve!

1. (Re)Open for Business

The game opens up with you meeting up with Master Wen, fresh off the purchase of his old hotpot restaurant. Master Wen agrees to help you set the place up to receive new customers, cleaning out some old rooms as the two of you go. This serves as a basic tutorial and while you start out with some money, it will be used to get some basic rooms up and running.

The first “room” Master Wen will have you clean up is the storefront itself, labeled “Outside.” This is where potential customers will wait before a table is freed up for them to enter. Their patience is not limited as they will eventually leave, though you are not penalized if any potential customers leave. All rooms can be upgraded by purchasing new furniture via the Store button at the lower left corner of the screen.

In the Outside’s case, any furniture purchased will increase the patience of waiting customers and increase the rate of new customers coming to visit, increasing your profits as you go. With the storefront more or less ready for work, Master Wen leads you inside to refurbish the restaurant properly. Just above the Store button is a quick navigation menu that allows you to quickly jump from room to room, even to places you have yet to properly fix up.

In the beginning, you only have to worry about two rooms: the Dining Hall, labeled “Hall,” and the Kitchen. The Dining Hall is where your customers are seated and where they have their meals, while the Kitchen is naturally where their orders are prepared and sent out. Your typical hotpot consists of two components: the broth, which is kept simmering on a stove, and the dishes, which usually consist of raw meats and vegetables which are dipped into the broth to cook them.

When you take an order, the customer or customers will ask for broth and dishes, as well as some refreshments if you have them, which immediately start cooking in the Kitchen. Both the broth and the dishes naturally take time to prepare and once they are done, both parts of the hotpot are delivered separately.

Generally, the broth itself is quick to prepare, so it can be brought to the customer sooner. The meal itself will not start until both the broth and its dishes are delivered. After the customer finishes their meal, you can bill them and start cleaning up the tables for the next round of customers.

There is no need to worry about buying ingredients: foodstuffs are generated as soon as an order is placed. However, there is an upper limit to how much food can be produced. This is found in the form of dirty dishes, which have to be cleaned up by tapping the sink at the bottom of the Kitchen. Once the dishes have been cleaned, food can be prepared once more.

While your customers are eating, you can occasionally listen in on their conversations as they talk about their day. This is just for flavor, no pun intended, and can be safely ignored until they pay their bills and leave the restaurant. In all cases, a bell will appear on the left side of the screen if there is something that needs your attention.

Furniture purchased for the Dining Hall includes additional tables to seat more groups of customers. But some of the furniture for that room also increases the rate of profit generated while you are away from the game. These include things like a condiments table, decorative plants, and air conditioning. How much offline profit you can accumulate is limited by your Restaurant Rank, displayed at the upper left corner of your screen. To increase your Restaurant Rank, you have to increase the following Ratings to certain thresholds:

• Facility Rating: This is increased by buying better furniture for the various rooms of your restaurant. You can switch to the previous furniture for aesthetic reasons without impairing your progress here.

• Service Rating: Increase this Rating by hiring new employees to help manage the restaurant, and training them as needed.

• Food Rating: Develop new broths and dishes, or upgrade preexisting ones, to increase this Rating.

Increasing your Restaurant Rank also opens up more of the restaurant to refurbish and customize. These include up to three VIP rooms that can handle up to eight customers at once or a section of the restaurant with a nearby theater for special guests to enjoy some entertainment while they eat. These rooms come with their own sets of furniture for further customization.

2. Revealing New Recipes

While the starting recipes Master Wen gives you are sufficient at the start, expanding your restaurant also means adding new things to the menu. Broths and dishes have separate ways of obtaining new recipes, and they can be upgraded with money to improve their earnings.

Broths and dishes can be upgraded up to five times and with Restaurant Rank affecting the upper limit, you can upgrade them. If you want to upgrade your meals past a certain level, you might have to increase your Restaurant Rank in turn. We will start with dishes first, as those are generally faster to obtain.

To obtain new dishes, you need to collect Food Elements, which are then merged into a new dish via the Develop button at the bottom of the screen. There are three Elements to collect in total, and all attempts to create new dishes will consume one of each Element. Elements are obtained by serving a set number of tables, which you can view by tapping the cat statue next to the cashier desk, roughly at the center of the screen.

Once enough tables have been served, the cat will award you with one of each Element, and the counter resets. As you increase your Restaurant Rank, the requirements for obtaining these Elements go up. Therefore, the rate you discover new dishes will slow down until you unlock new ways of getting Elements later on.

To create new broths, you have to obtain Flavors, and this uses the Storage menu which can be accessed at the bottom of the screen. The Storage menu is a 6 by 8 grid that holds both Flavors and various knickknacks you might find scattered around the restaurant. Above that grid are five plants that each correspond to a Flavor: Sour, Sweet, Bitter, Spicy, and Salty.

These plants can be tapped to give a level one Flavor, which can be merged to create a Flavor with a higher level, and so on. New broths are created by combining a level 5 Flavor from each category. That being said, you have to merge up to 16 level one Flavors to get a single level 5 Flavor. The rate you can gather Flavors from these plants is limited by two factors:

• The first factor is an energy cap of 30 units that prevents you from simply gathering as many Flavors as needed. Each unit takes three minutes to regenerate, so consuming all the energy will take 1.5 hours to fully restore.

• The second factor is a cooldown on individual plants that can trigger at random, so even if you spend your energy carefully, a plant might stop giving out Flavors for a while. The cooldown period itself can range from three minutes to one hour.

We mentioned finding knickknacks earlier, and periodically a customer will pay a visit and ask for a misplaced item in exchange for a reward or ask for a Flavor of a certain level. Returning lost items can award either a Food Element or a Flavor while handing a Flavor over will give you a lump sum of money in exchange.

Lost items can also be merged to create a different item to fulfill certain requests. If you do not have the requested items for whatever reason, you can either send the customer off yourself or wait for them to leave on their own. Excess items or Flavors can be sold off for small amounts of cash, but this is done mainly to free up space in Storage.

Both dishes and broths are developed similarly to a loot box: you spend whatever Dish Elements/Flavors you have to develop a new meal, and you can either spend them one at a time or try 10 attempts at once. All dishes and broths have an equal chance of being rewarded, and any duplicate meals are converted into lucky clovers.

Lucky clovers can be spent to buy training notes to improve the performance of your employees or items that reward a guaranteed meal you do not have. You can also find clovers from time to time when merging Flavors.

3. Recruiting and Refining Personnel

Running a restaurant on your own, even with all the comforts a video game provides, can get very taxing. Thus, you can hire employees to take on some tasks while you oversee upgrades and expansion. Employees can be hired and managed via the Staff button at the bottom of the screen.

All employees simply require a one-time hiring purchase and will perform their listed jobs automatically, occasionally taking breaks to relax before continuing. While working, most of your employees can trigger a buff that greatly increases the speed they perform their tasks for a short while. While this can be useful, this buff can trigger at random, potentially wasting the buff if it happens when the employee has nothing to do or decides to take a break.

Employees will only operate in certain rooms, which might require hiring people to cover the rooms their colleagues are not assigned to. Employees can be upgraded with the training notes we mentioned above, which increases both the speed at which they work and the chance they trigger their buff if they have one.

As you increase your Restaurant Rank, you unlock more ways to gather training notes. This is important as later employee upgrades will naturally require more training notes.  You can also customize the uniforms of your employees if you wish, but all alternate uniforms cost diamonds, the premium currency of My Hotpot Story.

As you unlock more rooms past the Dining Hall and VIP rooms, you can tap the tabs on the right side of the Staff screen to view additional employees to handle those rooms. For the time being, we will focus on the Restaurant Employees, as they will be the first ones you will meet and manage.

Restaurant Employees are grouped into five categories that give you an idea of what they can do, though you can tap the employee profile directly to get more details. These categories are as follows:

Waiter: Waiters will take the orders of incoming customers, deliver dishes to waiting customers, and clean up used tables after customers pay their bills (which is mistranslated as “sweeping”). The first employee the game recommends you to get, Wang, is a Waiter. Their buff temporarily increases the speed as he cleans up tables.

• Cashier: Cashiers naturally process bills, earning money automatically rather than you manually tapping each table ready to pay. Their buff increases the speed that cashiers process payments, which can come in handy if it triggers when multiple tables are ready to pay.

• Dispenser: Dispensers deliver dishes and, most importantly, broths to customers. While they may sound redundant with your Waiters, Waiters might be preoccupied with other tasks. Multiple dishes can be completed at once so having some Dispensers on standby can help with a sudden rush of customers. Their buff simply increases walking speed, allowing them to reach their destinations sooner.

• Cook: Cooks naturally help with food preparation and can be found in the Kitchen. Their buff increases cooking speed, and while the animations can look hilarious, the buff is vital once you unlock areas such as the VIP rooms which, as mentioned above, can hold up to eight customers whose orders will ask for two broths and twice as many dishes. The buffs of individual cooks can stack with each other.

• Welcome: Only one person can be found here, Aning, and she passively increases the rate that new customers come over to the restaurant. Unlike the other categories, Aning has no triggered buffs.

All employees have a Service Rating that comes into play with your Restaurant Rank. Hiring new employees and upgrading preexisting ones are the only way to increase your Service Rating. While you can fire hired employees for whatever reason, we recommend against it, as over time your restaurant offers more and more services. Older employees will have more than enough things to keep their hands full. Additionally, since there are no salaries to manage, there is no real harm in keeping older employees around.

4. Restaurant Management for Maximum Profit

Most of your gameplay in My Hotpot Story will consist of waiting for meals to finish cooking and waiting for customers to finish their meals. Even with employees, this can take some time to complete, so here are some tips you can use to improve your earnings:

• Always check on the cat. The cat shows your progress towards your next set of Dish Elements, but it also collects various goodies while you are away from the game. These can include Flavors, diamonds, and training notes. The number of things the cat can collect while you are offline is tied to your Restaurant Rank, or more specifically, the duration you can earn offline profit. The further you develop your hotpot restaurant, the more things the cat will find while you are out of the game.

• When it comes to managing your restaurant, it can be confusing as to what you have to do first. Fortunately, there is a Task list just above the Navigation button that gives you a hint on what to do next, in exchange for a cash reward upon completing it. This is great for people who are having trouble figuring out their next plan for improving the restaurant.
  
  Tasks might recommend buying specific furniture or hiring certain employees, so be prepared to spend some cash or save up if you do not have enough. As you go on, you are free to diverge from the Task list a bit, especially once you start advancing in Restaurant Rank.

• One piece of advice we can give you in expanding the restaurant early on is to buy an even mix of Dining Hall tables and furniture that improves offline income generation. Tables will let you tend to more customers at once, while offline coin generation will help you generate cash while you are away from the game.
  
  As you earn more money and successfully serve more customers, you can use the money to start improving the Kitchen and hiring employees while using any Dish Elements earned from the cat to get more dishes.

• Once you start gathering Flavors for new broths, we recommend organizing Storage to split the Flavors from lost items. In the example given below, The Flavors occupy the first five rows of Storage, organized according to level. The leftover space is given to lost items. This makes it easier to merge Flavors to get those elusive level 5 Flavors to make new broths.
  
  Since you also have a limited pool of energy for Flavor gathering, we also recommend focusing on one Flavor at a time, picking Flavors from the plants as needed while merging whatever level 1 Flavor the cat finds while you are away from the game.

• Employees help automate the game while you are there but consider doing tasks yourself from time to time. For instance, tapping a completed broth or dish set will instantly send it to its waiting table, while a Dispatcher or Waiter has to pick it up and physically bring it to the table instead. If your employees are currently preoccupied or are simply taking a break, give them a hand and help out. It is your restaurant after all.

• When it comes to upgrading employees, we recommend spending your first few training notes on any hired Cooks. They naturally speed up the rate broths and dishes are made on, top of their buff that periodically speeds them up. This is particularly vital when the VIP rooms come into play. More people mean more dishes to prepare. This can hold up the orders of customers at the Dining Hall. Increasing the cooking speed boost your Cooks provide, on top of making their buff more likely to trigger, can greatly increase the flow of cash.

• One employee you should look out for when you have the chance is not a Cook, but a Dishwasher named Aunt Luo, who is found in the Waiter section. She will automatically wash dishes once the sink is filled up, allowing your Cooks to prepare food as normal rather than tapping the sink yourself while you are busy upgrading the storefront. Her buff simply increases the speed at which customers enter the restaurant for a brief period, which is a nice touch.

• Lastly, do not forget to upgrade your meals when the money permits. Upgraded broths and dishes naturally earn more money when people ask for them, and they go a long way in improving the Restaurant’s Rank. In some cases, upgrading that broth might just be enough to reach the Food Rating needed to reach the next Rank.

And that concludes our guide to My Hotpot Story. We hope our tips help bring prosperity to your new hotpot restaurant. If you have any secrets to share with us, please let us know in the comment section!