You take on an empty shop unit in a side street in Leverkusen, put a second-hand espresso machine on a counter with four stools and sell coffee and bought-in cake. That is the whole first day — and you stand behind the counter yourself.
You do not sell guest by guest as in the holiday flats, nor through a rate plan as in the hotel, but through a menu you cost yourself. Every dish has four numbers — food cost, price, preparation time and popularity. Everything else follows from them.
In Germany you cannot simply open a hospitality business. You need the chamber of commerce briefing, the food hygiene instruction, a trade registration, a certificate of good conduct and an extract from the trade register. Together €230 and one trading day of waiting.
After that you take on the unit — 45 m² of rented floor space.
The whole start costs €2,805: 230 paperwork, 2,025 deposit (three months of rent, as is usual for commercial premises), 470 equipment, 80 first stock. You fetch the money from the current account.
⭐ The deposit is not lost money. It counts at 100 % towards the value of your save and comes back in full when you leave. Of the €2,805 only €780 are really spent.
🎁 And the first 90 trading days are rent-free — see the next section.
The contract has two parts, and that is the usual type for catering premises:
⭐ You always pay only the higher of the two, never both. The landlord secures a floor and shares in your success above it.
🎁 The first 90 trading days are rent-free (three game months = 7.5 real days). A rent-free start-up period of one to three months is customary in German commercial leases — the landlord grants it for fit-out and start-up. The 12 % revenue share runs from day one; only the base rent is waived. The "🏠 Rent & lease" card shows how many trading days are left and what will be added afterwards.
What that means for you:
The rent grows with the house. Every extension adds floor space: rear dining room +28 m², function room +30, winter garden +22, upper floor +40 — at full build-out 201 m² and about €100 a trading day. How much rent an extension adds is shown in the offer before you buy.
⚠️ The terrace costs no rent — it is public pavement and costs a special-use fee instead. Charging both would be charging twice.
You get the deposit back in full when you leave — it counts at 100 % towards the value of your save.
Under "📊 Figures" there is a card 🏠 Rent & lease: floor space, base rent, revenue share and what you actually pay today — and why.
Game time runs twelve times faster than real time, exactly as in the haulage game. A trading day of 24 game hours therefore lasts two real hours, and twelve trading days pass in a real day.
The day has fixed times: delivery at 06:00, preparation until 08:00, then ☕ café until 11:30, 🍽️ lunch until 14:30, café again until 17:30, 🌙 evening service until 22:30 and then closing.
The most important promise: there is not a single decision you have to make during a particular service. Everything you set applies to the whole trading day — and usually to all the following ones until you change it. A missed service is not a missed move.
Every dish has a food cost, a price you set, a preparation time in kitchen minutes and a popularity. From those the game works out three numbers that always sit next to the dish:
The third one is the clever bit. A rump steak brings €17.10 a plate but needs 11 kitchen minutes — €1.55 a minute. A tarte flambée brings only €9.20 but needs 5 minutes — €1.84. When the kitchen is the bottleneck the tarte is the better dish, even though it earns less. That is exactly why real lunch menus are short.
⚠️ But it only holds if the kitchen really is the bottleneck. On a quiet Tuesday evening it is not — then profit per plate counts. The game tells you which of the two applies.
Your starting menu has eight dishes — exactly as many as a counter without a kitchen can carry: coffee, cappuccino, tea, apple spritzer, mineral water, fresh juice, a slice of cake and a filled roll. It is a good start but not the optimum: hot chocolate and croissant are waiting, and anyone who does the sums will find a few more per cent. That is the first real decision of the game — and it costs nothing.
Above your menu the same sentence always stands, and it is the central feedback of the game:
Menu: 14 dishes · avg. food cost 27.4 % · target 24–30 %
It turns green, amber or red, and a tap shows the culprits. Why 24–30 % and not the 28–32 % the trade quotes? Because drinks are counted in here. They make up about a third of your revenue and sit around 18 %, which pulls the blend down. That is exactly the connection you are meant to learn.
⚠️ And the trap: the ratio alone is a bad target. A house that only sells soup (17 %) has a dream ratio and no revenue. That is why the absolute contribution margin always stands beside it.
The price of a dish works twice: on the choice of dish (a dear schnitzel is ordered less often — guests take the cheaper one next to it) and, through the price level of the whole menu, on the number of guests at all.
From that follows a nice rule: raise ONE dish and you lose almost no guests; raise everything and you lose guests. Selective pricing beats blanket pricing.
The range is −30 % to +80 % of the going rate. Prices are slid, not typed — on a phone every keyboard covers exactly the number you want to change. Two quick buttons (−0.50 / +0.50) come with it.
⚠️ And the first lesson costs real money: fill the place first, then raise prices. Charge €4.20 for a coffee on day one instead of €2.80 and you will sit alone.
One dish a trading day can be marked as the dish of the day. It gets two and a half times the popularity — it is on the board outside.
And here the food-cost mechanic really shines: purchase prices move daily by up to 15 %. The dish whose ingredients are cheap today is today’s most profitable choice — the list shows you directly.
The decision takes five seconds and works with one thumb. If you do not choose, you lose nothing: yesterday’s dish stays on and simply works a little less well, because it is no longer new.
That is why the game does not overwhelm you. Having breakfast, lunch and dinner on day one would mean understanding three menus, three rotas and three shopping baskets before selling a single coffee.
⚠️ Honestly: as long as there is no lunch service your café is open continuously from 08:00 to 17:30 — the middle of the day belongs to it. Once the hot kitchen runs it loses that, and café trade drops noticeably. Lunch and evening more than make up for it, but it says so in the offer so the drop does not surprise you.
The weekday swings harder here than in any other game in the arcade: the evening sits at a factor of 0.45 on Monday and 1.85 on Saturday. Lunch runs the other way round.
That is exactly why real landlords have a closing day. Here it is a voluntary switch, any weekday. Anyone who never touches it opens seven days and plays perfectly sensibly — there is no penalty, no exhaustion, no creeping decline.
It pays off exactly when staff are your bottleneck: after a closing day the team is rested (kitchen time −8 %, service sub-score +0.2 for six trading days), and the same staff hours spread over six days instead of seven.
A newly set closing day takes effect from the next game week — guests with a reservation are never locked out.
German hospitality spends about 40 cents per euro of revenue on staff in 2026. Ignore that and you are not building a hospitality game.
You set three sliders per service: kitchen, service and wash-up. Next to each one the suggested requirement stands for free, and there is a "take the suggestion" switch — on by default.
⚠️ The mini-job limit is not decoration: €603 a month at the €13.90 minimum wage is exactly 43.4 hours — in the game 43.4 game hours per game month and person, about 1.45 a trading day. Covering Saturday night with casuals needs several mini-jobbers; beyond a certain size it does not work without permanent staff. Recruiting costs €60 and is the cheapest and most effective decision of the early game.
⭐ One casual shift covers all three roles. In a café the same person does service and wash-up — three separate minimum shifts are not sent out. The hours go to the roles where something is really uncovered, and are paid at the weighted average of their hourly rates.
⚠️ If your allowance is not enough for a full shift, the casual simply does not come every day — the monthly average is what counts. So you never pay three hours for an hour and a half of work. The duty roster shows how many hours your allowance gives, how many are planned today and — when it binds — how many stay uncovered.
Premiums are real: Sunday +50 %, night from 20:00 +25 %. If you can only open one evening, open on Friday.
⚠️ A cancelled service costs chances, never substance.
⭐ And the game tells you WHAT it was. When guests leave, the counter says whether there really was no free table or whether hands were missing in the kitchen, in service or at the wash-up. That difference is everything: in a café the seats are almost never the bottleneck — buying more chairs then helps not at all, while another casual for €60 helps at once.
Unlike the hotel a restaurant has no official classification. So there is exactly one number: the review score from 1.0 to 5.0.
| Sub-score | Weight | What it depends on |
|---|---|---|
| Food | 30 % | food cost ratio, chef, freshness |
| Service | 22 % | service hands against guests |
| Kitchen wait | 16 % | kitchen minutes against demand |
| Value | 14 % | your price level against the going rate |
| Atmosphere | 10 % | condition, furnishing, music |
| Cleanliness | 8 % | hygiene level |
⚠️ The "food" sub-score depends on the food cost ratio — the sharpest conflict in the game. Push the ratio from 30 % down to 24 % and you earn markedly more per dish while losing score points. Through the demand effect that costs you more than you gain. It is not a penalty, it is a balance.
One star more is worth about +7 % demand. The score starts at 3.6 and barely moves at first — a young house should not collapse on its first bad review.
With the evening service the reservation book appears. Accepting a reservation blocks the table — even if ten walk-ins are standing at the door. That is the decision: safety against flexibility.
No-shows exist from the start — in reality 10 to 20 % of all reservations are not honoured. Three upgrades push the rate from 16 % via 11 % and 6 % down to 4 %; the last one honestly costs something (8 % fewer reservations, because a card guarantee puts some guests off).
⚠️ Plenty of walk-in trade makes you almost immune to no-shows: if guests are waiting, the table fills by itself and the loss is nil.
What a confirmed booking gains you — and what it costs. Confirmed guests are near certain to turn up, and some of them would not have come at all. That is the gain: predictable custom on quiet days. The cost is the held table — it crowds out walk-ins, but only when there is demand. On a quiet evening it costs nothing. Money is never deducted for it, only the seat.
That is why every enquiry shows how busy the target day is expected to be: "plenty of room" — accept. "usually full" — better to decline and leave the seats to walk-ins. Measured across a game year this is worth roughly five per cent either way, depending on the weekday. Turning every booking down costs you nothing — both routes work.
From the function room you get group enquiries, and with banqueting upstairs proper banquets of up to 55 people: a set price, predictable food cost, no risk of a no-show. In return they block the room all evening — the calculation is in the offer.
There is no waste event in this game. No message, no charge, no dialogue saying "your €84 of salmon has spoiled". The 6 % waste rate is already inside the food cost of every dish.
That makes waste not a loss but a state — and a state can be improved:
Instead of "waste takes 6 % off you" it reads "good housekeeping gives you up to 5 % back". Mathematically the same, in play the opposite.
The ordering policy is a real balance: "tight" saves 4 % food cost but dishes run out. "Generous" costs 3 % more and nothing ever runs out. On a Saturday evening you order generously, on a Monday tight.
The hygiene level (0–100 %) falls with every guest and with the age of the kitchen — and rises with your hygiene budget (recommended 1.5 % of revenue).
Roughly every 25 trading days an unannounced inspection comes:
⚠️ The normal case is nothing or a bonus. Damage only occurs if you fail to react twice in a row — and then it is small and was announced. An inspection never causes a closure.
Music in the house costs a floor-area-based royalty fee (€1.15 to €8.22 a trading day). You can switch it off — the fee goes, but the atmosphere sub-score drops by 0.3.
The first eleven steps grow the space: window counter & bar stools, first tables, terrace, cold kitchen, rear dining room, hot kitchen, bar licence, function room, kitchen level 3, winter garden and finally the upper floor — at 130 seats it stops.
🪟 Window counter & bar stools (€250) is the first step you can actually afford — after roughly seven trading days, that is about fourteen real hours. Four seats against a wall that is there anyway: no extra floor space to rent, no running costs, no build time. It adds about a third to your result per trading day and pays for itself in roughly 14 trading days. And it does not delay the first tables — it helps pay for them.
The next nine grow the quality: wine list, second kitchen shift, banqueting, delivery, catering, deli corner, the lease renegotiation, the "recommended house" award and finally buying the building. That is the more important part: a 130-seat house that is run well earns more than one that is merely big.
Three steps change everything:
Paying is not the same as finished: from the first tables onwards every conversion needs a build time. It is shown in the offer before you buy — in trading days, with the real hours next to it, so you know what you are committing to. It follows the amount of work, not the price: having furniture delivered is two trading days (four real hours), knocking through a wall six, the ventilation for the hot kitchen eight, and the whole upper floor ten — nothing in the game takes longer.
While the building work is going on, your business carries on as normal. The site costs you not a single seat and not a single guest. It only costs time: the seats, floor space, rent and fixed costs of the new expansion all arrive with completion — so until then it costs you nothing ongoing either.
You do not have to watch it: the work continues in the background and is finished at the right moment, even if you were away in between. If your restaurant is paused (because you have not looked in for a while), the building work pauses with it — it is exactly as far along when you come back, you lose nothing.
🪟 Window counter & bar stools is the one exception: four stools screwed to a wall, that is immediate. The same goes for everything where nothing is actually built — the reservation book, the first-aid course, the lease renegotiation, the award and buying the building. A contract takes effect when it is signed.
⚠️ Never buy an extension without turned-away demand. Next to every seating extension it says how many guests recently had to leave. If there is nothing, the extension only lowers your occupancy and adds fixed costs. The winter garden even says itself that it is the weakest one.
The 12 % turnover lease is, at full build-out, the biggest single item after staff and food. Getting rid of it is the biggest lever in the game — and deliberately in two steps.
Step 1: renegotiate to 9 %. It costs no money but performance: 60 trading days without arrears and a score of at least 4.0. That is the nicest way to grow this game has — you do not buy it, you earn it. And it is the answer for everyone who never has €350,000.
Step 2: buy the building for €350,000. ⚠️ It requires the renegotiation. Afterwards the lease disappears entirely, but €110 a trading day of property tax, insurance and building upkeep arrive — for a small café the purchase would be a loss-making deal.
When you buy the hot kitchen your café becomes a restaurant — and your house deserves a name of its own. You choose it yourself. Before that it is simply "your café"; that is meant to feel unfinished so the naming feels like an upgrade.
The name sits above the door, in the header, in reservations and in reviews. Later it appears in the haulage freight exchange and on a hospital admission — where other players see it.
3 to 28 characters, letters, digits, spaces and - ' & . The first rename is free, every further one costs €500 — a new sign costs money.
Your business till may go into the red — but not without limit. If it drops below −500 €, the restaurant halts and stands still.
It starts again as soon as you have topped it up from your current account so the till is back at 0 €. Neither the 24-hour window nor any waiting time applies to that — that is exactly what this exception is for.
Standing still really means standing still, in both directions:
That is the whole point of the rule: you should be able to buy your way out once and then carry on normally — not drop back below −500 € in the same moment because the standstill gets billed retrospectively.
⚠️ Your current account is not affected: rent, cost of living and loan instalments keep running. It is the business that halts, not your account.
The restaurant recalculates trading day by trading day — two days away are 24 steps, which a phone does in milliseconds.
The iron rule: the clock on the screen is display only. A trading day is always calculated the same, whether you watch or not. An open tab does not earn a cent more.
After eight hours without you the house runs on low power: it reaches 70 % of what is possible, 92 % with a restaurant manager. Group enquiries and banquets lapse and are listed in the report. ⚠️ Low power slows you down — it does no damage. No score loss from being away, no resignations, no spoilage damage, no closure.
And if money gets tight an emergency brake in three stages kicks in: budgets to zero, then casuals stood down, and only at the very end permanent staff have to go. Debt is never created.
❄️ Once your pause time is up, the business freezes. If you do not look into the restaurant for longer than that, exactly that span is calculated — after that the game clock stands still until you open the game again. And it stops on both sides: no guests, but also no wages, no rent, no lease, no fixed costs. Nothing lapses, nothing spoils, no deadline runs out, nobody resigns. You find your house exactly as you left it.
How long that pause time is, you set yourself. On the start page, below the game tiles, sits the collapsible box “⏸️ Pause setting per game” — there you choose it for each business separately. Without a setting of your own the default of 6 hours applies. For the restaurant you can choose 6, 12, 18 or 24 hours. More would be too much here, because time runs fast-forward: one trading day takes 2 real hours, so a real day is 12 trading days. The default of 6 hours therefore equals 3 trading days, and the full step of 24 hours 12 trading days. Your choice takes effect the next time you open the game.
⚠️ This is not a punishment but a cap: without it you would come back from a four-week break a rich man without lifting a finger. If you play daily you will never notice it. The limit applies per game: what counts is when you were last here, not what you did elsewhere in the arcade.
The clock runs from your last click, not from the last time the page was loaded. A tab left open for the whole pause time with nobody doing anything freezes exactly like a closed one — watching is not playing. In return every click counts as a sign of life, even one on a tab, and restarts the clock.
If the business is standing still the game says so at the top of the page: "⏸️ Paused". A single click sets everything going again, with no reload — and with nothing paid out for the time it stood. That time simply did not happen.
When you come back a page explains what happened — with cause and suggestion, not just numbers. If the business stood still it says so too — with the default, for example: "Your restaurant ran 3 of 120 trading days."
In any busy place something happens sooner or later: a circulatory collapse, an allergic reaction, a fall. The landlord is not to blame — but how he reacts is up to him.
Roughly every 4,000 guests such an incident occurs. If you have bought the first-aid course (€240), your staff can help at once: service sub-score +0.6 for 20 trading days, a reputation boost, and the guest comes back as a regular.
⚠️ And if you happen to be away, nothing bad happens either: the ambulance comes by itself, the party pays the bill, there is no score penalty and no lost payment. The incident is a chance, not a risk. If you have the course the bonus is granted offline too — that is what the training is for.
A trading day lasts two real hours. If you play for an hour in the evening you only experience a slice of the day — usually the same one every time.
Under "📊 Figures" you will therefore find the question "When do you usually play?" — mornings, midday, evenings or any time. It shifts the start of the game clock so that your chosen service is running when you open the game.
⚠️ It shifts the display only, never the calculation. The trading days run exactly as before and the result is identical. Otherwise it would be a hidden advantage — and the iron rule "same formula online and offline" would be broken.
And because you only experience a slice but steer the whole day, every trading day ends with the daily summary and, below it, the last seven days. There you see patterns a single service never shows — that lunch runs best on Tuesdays, or that the evening has been weak since your price rise.
The table mix (under 🔨 Expand) decides how well your seats are used. Two guests at a table for four block four seats — which is why occupancy never reaches 100 %.
The floor plan shows it directly: every table has as many chairs as it has seats, and occupied chairs carry a guest. One glance tells you whether the house is full — or whether only the small tables are taken while the large ones stand empty.
Three budgets are set as a share of revenue:
Next to each slider you can see what it costs you in euros per trading day (a trading day is two real hours), with the total also shown per real day. The basis is the revenue of your last trading day. The daily summary lists the same item as "Budgets" — there you see the amount that was actually charged.
⚠️ If the till runs low the emergency brake cuts exactly these three to zero first — they are the first thing a landlord drops and the only thing that can be restored without damage.
The game is built for a thumb from the start, not made "responsive" afterwards:
And: put the phone down in the middle of the evening service and you lose nothing. Reservation enquiries sit for a whole trading day, banquet enquiries for three — nothing lapses in seconds.