To play Restaurant City you create a free account, customize your chef, hire a cook and a waiter, pick a menu and serve customers. Every dish earns coins and gourmet points, and the points raise your level, up to level 65. Everything is done with the mouse, in your browser. This guide walks through the account, the tutorial, serving, levels, decoration, visiting your neighbors and the mistakes that can cost you a minute of progress.
Here is the game: open it in your browser, create your free account and put this guide into practice from the first tutorial step.
Customize your chef, hire a cook and a waiter, pick the menu, serve your customers and decorate your place in this classic Facebook restaurant game.
In beta: some parts of the original game are not complete yet and you may run into bugs.
Open restaurantcity.fbgamesweb.com, press “Create my restaurant”, choose a username, a password and a character, and press “Create account”. After that, press “Play” to enter your restaurant.
The username has 3 to 20 characters: letters, numbers, dots, hyphens and underscores, starting with a letter or a number. The password needs at least 8 characters, and common passwords or one equal to your username are rejected. The character is male or female, and the email is optional. You do not need Facebook.
The tutorial follows a fixed order. First you choose how your chef looks: skin, hair and clothes. Then you step in as the cook yourself, and in the Job Center (the “Hire Friends” button inside the game) you hire your first helper and make them the waiter.
The rule to remember is that the restaurant opens only when it has at least one cook and one waiter with energy. Until then the closed sign stays up and no customers come. As soon as both are working, the sign disappears and customers start to arrive.
The tutorial then shows you the recipe menu, where it teaches you Garden Salad, followed by Friends Street and the decoration editor. When it ends you are level 1 with 3,500 coins. If you ever have no free slot for a new employee, reach the next level or let someone go with “Sack”.
You begin with three recipes (Tomato and Basil Soup, Burger and Fries, and Fruit Selection) and seven ingredients (Beef, Egg, Potato, Salad, Strawberry, Tomato and Apple). With those, the menu tutorial steers you to learn Garden Salad, which needs Salad, Tomato and Egg. Learning it takes you to level 2 and pays 2,500 coins.
Each customer comes in, sits down, orders, eats and pays, which took 67 to 80 seconds from the door to the payment in our tests. Every dish served pays 2 coins, whatever the recipe, plus gourmet points: 1 in a level 1 recipe and somewhat more in higher level ones. In one test run, three dishes moved the purse from 3,500 to 3,506 coins.
Drinks come in from level 15: the waiters prepare them and you need a dispenser. We have not verified that in a real game yet, so treat it as the rule on paper.
Gourmet points raise your level, and there are 65 levels. At some milestones the points needed are: level 1, 50; level 2, 70; level 3, 100; level 5, 500; level 10, 8,000; level 20, 86,000; level 30, 370,000; level 40, 1,168,000; level 50, 2,093,000; and level 65, 3,668,000.
Each level opens more room to grow. Employee slots go from 2 at level 1 to 3 at level 2, 4 at level 5, 5 at level 8, 6 at level 11, 7 at level 14, 8 at level 17 and 9 from level 21. The menu holds 1 dish at the start, 2 from level 10 and 3 from level 20. The restaurant grows from 8x8 tiles up to 19x19 from level 31.
Reaching a level pays coins: 3,500 for level 1, 2,500 for level 2 and 1,000 for each of the other levels.
Recipes need ingredients. There are 62, with a rarity from 1 to 5 (15, 18, 18, 8 and 3 ingredients per rarity; Dragon Fruit, Lobster and Saffron are rarity 5). You buy them and neighbors give them to you. The garden is also meant to grow them, but we have not checked it end to end.
To decorate, open the editor, the hammer icon. There you buy furniture with your coins and drag tables, chairs, stoves and ornaments from the shop onto the floor. In our test a table cost 150 coins. More space and more tables mean more customers at once.
Friends Street lists the restaurants of other players, up to 50 neighbors. Click one to look around or visit. Every visit gives you a reward, and your first visit to a neighbor gives you an ingredient.
You also get a free ingredient every day you log in, and one more for each day in a row that you come back.
Everything is done with the mouse: click to choose, drag to place furniture, and use the wheel or the trackpad to scroll the lists. Esc closes windows, or you can press their button. There are no documented keyboard shortcuts.
The game bar shows sound, music, quality, full screen, coins, cash, level and gourmet points, popularity, mail, folder, camera, recipes, market, gift, scoreboard and the decoration hammer. All of them are on screen, but some belong to parts of the beta that have not been checked in depth.
Above the game, the page has Play, Guide, Support and Donate, which open panels on the same page. It also has “Enlarge” for a wide view inside the window, sound, language and your account. “Leave” asks you to confirm before it closes the game.
Only one game can be open per account. If you open Restaurant City in another tab or on another device, the earlier one closes.
The game saves by itself about once a minute and when the tab loses focus. If you press F5 or close the window abruptly, you can lose up to a minute of work, including your latest coin collections. To stop calmly, use “Leave”.
If loading stops you will see “Loading stopped. Check your connection and try again.” with a “Try again” button, and if the game does not start, “The game could not start.” Check your connection, use an up-to-date browser and try again.
Three steps and you're in.
From this home page. Each game opens at its own address, with its own start screen.
A quick sign-up inside the game. Your progress is saved on the server, not in your browser.
You play in your browser, with no Flash and no downloads, on a computer and, depending on the game, on your phone too.
Go to restaurantcity.fbgamesweb.com, press Create my restaurant, choose a username, a password and a character, and press Create account. Then press Play and follow the tutorial: pick your chef's look, hire a helper in the Job Center and make them your waiter.
Your Restaurant City restaurant opens only when it has at least one cook and one waiter with energy. Without them the closed sign stays up and no customers arrive. Hire a helper in the Job Center, give them the waiter job and make sure someone is cooking.
Restaurant City has 65 levels. You level up with gourmet points, which you earn by serving dishes. Level 1 needs 50 points, level 10 needs 8,000 and level 65 needs 3,668,000. Reaching a level pays 1,000 coins, except levels 1 and 2, which pay 3,500 and 2,500.
In Restaurant City you start with three recipes (Tomato and Basil Soup, Burger and Fries, and Fruit Selection) and seven ingredients (Beef, Egg, Potato, Salad, Strawberry, Tomato and Apple). The tutorial then teaches you Garden Salad, which takes you to level 2 and gives you 2,500 coins.
In this edition of Restaurant City every dish served pays 2 coins, whatever the recipe, plus gourmet points. These are the rules of this server and they are not necessarily the same as in the original game. A customer takes roughly 67 to 80 seconds from the door to the payment.
Restaurant City has 107 recipes: 25 starters, 35 mains, 27 desserts and 20 drinks. It also has 62 ingredients, with a rarity from 1 to 5. Ingredients are bought and received from neighbors, and every day you log in you get a free one.
Open the editor with the hammer icon in Restaurant City, buy tables, chairs, stoves and ornaments with your coins and drag them from the shop onto the floor. More tables and more space let more customers sit at once. The restaurant itself grows with your level, from 8x8 to 19x19 tiles.
Restaurant City saves about once a minute and when the tab loses focus, and your restaurant is stored on the server, tied to your account. Reloading with F5 or closing the window abruptly can lose the last minute of earnings. Use the Leave button to exit calmly.
Brand notice: Restaurant City is an original game by Playfish (Electronic Arts). Facebook is a trademark of Meta Platforms, Inc. FB Games is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Playfish, Electronic Arts, Facebook or Meta. This is a browser edition, in beta.
Creating an account takes a minute, and you play straight from your browser.