Restaurant guide

The Sim Companies food expansion brought a lot of new food industry resources and buildings, but also a completely new way of doing retail!

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Are you considering running a successful restaurant business? There are few things you should know.

As a restaurant owner, your goal is to run your restaurant in a profitable way. You are responsible for deciding:

• what is on the menu - which food items and at what quality.

• what’s the quality of your staff.

• is your restaurant spacious, luxurious, or throughput-oriented?

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All of the decisions above influence your costs and the rating of your restaurant. The restaurant rating needs to be built over time.

Your CMO (communication) also impacts the rating your restaurant receives. Effective communication skill points increases your restaurant rating by 0.01

The most important aspect the restaurant owner needs to decide on is the price of the menu. You can think of this as the price of one meal, or the price each of your customers will pay.

Whether the virtual population of Sim Companies, Simeons, decides to dine at your restaurant is driven by the price and the rating of your restaurant. They take into account your price/rating offer, as well as the other restaurants in the game, and decide where they want to dine.

While setting the price, you will see a red/green bar showing you revenue estimates at various levels of occupation. The higher the price, the larger the maximum possible revenue, the lower the price the higher chances your restaurant will be cheaper than the competition and thus get a high occupancy.

The restaurant operates in 12 hours cycles. Before the cycle is started, you can make adjustments and update your menu price. At this time, your costs (wages and food sourcing costs) are known.

The restaurant occupancy and updated rating are known only at the end of the cycle. Since revenue depends on occupancy, revenue and profit are only known after the cycle is over.

The restaurant can be set up to automatically start a new cycle after one finishes - automatically deducting food items from your warehouse.

Warning: by pressing the “open for business” button you are going to start the 12 hour cycle for the restaurant. This cannot be cancelled.

The “close restaurant” button that appears is so you can stop the next 12 hour cycle from automatically starting.

Note: Rating will decrease when the restaurant is closed (12.5% reduction occurs only once on closure).

The “keep open” button allows you to queue the next 12 hour cycle automatically.

RESTAURANT MENU - FOOD ITEMS

At least one item in each food category is required. Each food item has a different impact on your new rating, depending mostly on their cost. You also receive a rating bonus for having a variety of items. The more items in a category are available, the less of each is consumed.

Higher quality food impacts your new rating as well.

Warning: Food items available on the menu during a cycle are lost whether they are sold to Simeons or not. The leftover food simply goes to waste (spoiled).

The top number shown on each item is how many units you have your in your Warehouse. The bottom number is showing how many units will be needed/used during the 12 hour cycle of the restaurant. Having more than one item selected in each category changes the amount needed for each cycle.

You can either set the sell low quality or high quality foods from your inventory. Quality is consumed based on the setting of Low or High.

Low quality starts at q0 and goes upwards to q1 then q2 and so on.

High quality starts at q12 then goes downwards to q11 and so on.

You may have multiple restaurants at different tiers (fast food or fancy); a fast food restaurant with low quality selected, will only pull the lowest possible quality items from your warehouse to sell during the cycle. While your fancy restaurant may want to sell high quality food and this will pull the highest possible quality foods from your warehouse.

If the item is not in your warehouse the Exchange button will appear at the bottom.

RESTAURANT OCCUPANCY

The virtual people of Sim Companies are split into 3 groups:

• High paying customers, looking mainly at rating and less on the price;

• Customers on budget, looking primarily at the menu price;

• Middle-class customers, looking at both.

The proportional size of each group changes with the economic cycle. The goal is to position your restaurant offer where the demand is and competition is lacking. It could be low costs, high throughput, cheap restaurants. Or low throughput, high rating, upscale expensive dining place.

Furthermore, the size of all 3 groups is influenced by the number of buildings of active players in the game. So, the restaurant demand and occupancy are high if there are comparatively few restaurants in the game. But it can easily turn around if all companies decide to build restaurants.

STAFF QUALITY

You can decide to hire professional staff to replace rookies. The professional staff results in a higher rating but also makes your wages 5 times higher. Changing the staff type doesn't require downtime.

SEATING STYLE

You can decide between fast-food style (throughput-optimized seating) and luxury style. Fast-food (Economy) style has more seating capacity but is not very luxurious. Or you can have a fancy, upscale place with fewer tables, which gets a higher rating. There are no operating costs for the fancy decorations, but the renovation requires downtime equal to upgrade time and costs similarly.

Having fewer tables reduces your maximum revenue since it will result in fewer paying customers even at maximum occupancy. However, this also reduces your food requirements proportionally: lower COGS.

Luxury restaurant wages are half of the economy restaurant wages.

Level one restaurant:
1000 seats for Economy and 500 seats for Luxury

Increasing the level of the restaurant increases capacity:

CONCLUSION

Do you have the chops to make it in Restaurant retail?

RECAP

In order to open the restaurant for business:

Need to pick at least 1 item from each category (salad bar, main courses, drinks) in the menu.

Need to input a Menu price.

Optional items are Restaurant Seating and Staff Options.

Menu Price max value is $350, lowest value is $60

Other Details:

Once open for business each retail cycle is 12 hours. Note: once you start the cycle it cannot be cancelled.

Each restaurant has its own rating.

Closing the restaurant decreases rating by 12.5% (occurs only once when restaurant closes).

Effective communication skill points increases your restaurant rating by 0.01.

Sales speed bonus adds 0.02 to the resulting restaurant rating. 

Luxury restaurant multiplies the effect of the rating, rather than add to it.

ARTICLES

Helpful articles from our local newspaper The Sim Companies Times:

Demystifying Restaurants - Part 1
Demystifying Restaurants - Part 2
Demystifying Restaurants - Part 3

(Note: Part 1, 2, and 3, were published before 21st of February - Changes to restaurants )

What is needed to successfully run a restaurant?