I got into Restaurant City only a few weeks ago, though I knew it about it way before then as a lot of my friends got addicted to it way before I did. This doesn’t make me any less of an addict — it just means that maybe, they’ll get over Restaurant City sooner than I will. Maybe.

One of my friends described it to be a lot like Sim City. It was. It’s a game with no conflict, so it’s more of a toy than a game as you can’t actually lose — a feature that appealed to the less competitive of the ever-expanding sea of Facebook users who have tired of checking in on their friends’ lives and have now turned their attention to the games that have been popping up all over the place like highly-engrossing bacteria. Apart from the impossibility of defeat, Restaurant City has other enticing features and concepts that work together in an evil orchestra of addiction.

The game is simple: you are given an amount of money to manage your own little restaurant. As people eat there, your restaurant grows larger and you can hire a bigger staff. You can buy stuff to change your restaurant’s appearance and trade ingredients with other players to expand your menu.

I enjoyed the fact that I can turn any one of my contacts into a slave.

Now the first thing I noticed and enjoyed was the feature that allowed you to hire your Facebook contacts as your employees. Actually, that’s the first thing you’re told to do. People can find joy in this in the normal way, which is paying pretend with the best friends, but personally, I enjoyed the fact that I can turn any one of my contacts into a slave. Yes: former bosses, exes, reviled teachers, and random hated people. Even better, if you don’t feed your employees, they lie there unconscious. Of course, starving your slaves isn’t going to make your restaurant progress faster, but it is satisfying for folk inclined to think along those lines. You can hire yourself, and buy accessories and clothes, and dress yourself up, and your getup will reflect on all of the other versions of yourself that your contacts may have hired. It is notable that the clothes and accessories are unbiased with regard to gender, so this means that you can crossdress your heart out if you are so inclined.

From there, you assign which of your slaves (yes, I will keep on referring to my employees as slaves for the rest of this writing) will become waiters, cooks, and cleaners. The logic is mind-bogglingly simple as to what these roles mean. Once that’s done, people will start to trickle in and your imaginary restaurant career will begin.

Each satisfied customer gives you three things: money, popularity, and gourmet points.

Money is easy. Each meal will earn you two dollars. Oddly, anything from a simple burger to lobster will earn you two dollars. I actually thought of a reason why this is: when everything balances out, say, the cost of the ingredients, the preparation, and the equipment is factored in, a dish will net a profit of two dollars. Of course, I have no actual knowledge of restaurant management, so this is a wild guess at best. It is, however, easier for me to believe that the customers didn’t pay just two bucks for a whole lobster meal.

On the other hand, what really defies logic is the cost of your slaves’ refreshments. Over time, your slaves will grow tired, and this is reflected as percentages in their status boxes (also by smilies which turn into frownies if you leave them unfed). To keep them healthy and happy, you need to feed them one of four things of escalating values of nutrition: water, apple, banana, and sandwich.

Anyway, a glass of water costs twenty five dollars. Yes, anything on your menu costs two dollars, while a glass of water for your slave costs twenty five. It must be some sort of magical potion.

Popularity also grows with each happy diner, and as it grows, you get more customers. Eventually, it’ll go up to a point where you can’t serve everyone who comes in, and when this happens, the unseated customers leave, annoyed, causing Popularity to go down. Any sort of waiting can cause customers to leave, so the application provides a lot of stuff that enable you to stall customers, such as forcing them to wander through a maze of your making before getting to their seats, video arcade machines, and extra chairs—lots and lots of chairs.

Gourmet Points, or GP in this world of acronyms, is what you need for your restaurant to “level up”, much like a character from any multiplayer game. As you increase the levels of your dishes, you get slightly more GPs each time that dish gets served. You level up your dishes by expending ingredients for them. A dish would have a set of ingredients (such as beef, bread, and potato for burger and fries). You get one ingredient every day, but you can get that ingredient only if you log into the fiendish game, which forces you to log into the game daily. You can get another one by answering a quiz about food, also daily. However, the best sources of ingredients are other players. The first time you visit another player’s restaurant, you get one free ingredient, and from that point on, you can begin to trade ingredients. The ingredient trade system makes people stoop to begging, blackmail, extortion, and making fake Facebook accounts.

As your restaurant goes up in levels, it slowly becomes bigger and you can eventually hire more of your contacts as slaves. With a bigger staff and restaurant, you can have more tables with which to serve more people in order to gain more Popularity, because of which you gain more money with which you buy more tables, so on and so forth. It’s called an online game.

There are lots of tips and tricks to run an efficient restaurant, but they all point towards treating your customers as badly as possible. For example, the best way to lay your tables out is to have them surround the cooking area as tightly as possible. This way, your waiter doesn’t need to walk at all to serve food. This also ensures that you serve as many tables possible, granted your limited floor space and manpower. That your customers are squeezed to eat elbow-to-elbow doesn’t matter, and the best restaurant layouts are reminiscent of greasy spoon diners, though some would nod sagely and proclaim that greasy spoon diners are indeed the best restaurants.

Another important trick is to keep your customers from their seats as long as you can. Since they automatically plot out a course towards the nearest chair, it would be best to construct a winding maze with potted plants, dividers, stereos, and whatever else you have lying around. Apparently, wandering around makes people forget their hunger at least long enough for the previous customer to finish eating. A recent feature requires restaurant owners to provide toilets. Unfortunately, this preceded a feature that enabled restaurants to have doors other than the one people use to get in. In effect, this forces people to go about their after-eating business pretty much in public. Again, the citizens of Restaurant City do not seem to mind having other people take a dump in full view while they dine.

…There are lots of tips and tricks to run an efficient restaurant, but they all point towards treating your customers as badly as possible.

Despite the numerous lapses of logic — or perhaps because of them — Restaurant City is horribly addictive. I could stare at my restaurant for hours, watching the customers navigate the winding maze I made for them and watching my friends/slaves to catch them when they get tired so I can give them a sip of water and then whip them to work. It may be the cute little avatars and their clothes. It may be the thrill of getting a new dish, or picking up garbage, or even seeing your other friends come into your restaurant. It can be any number, or all of these for a lot of people. Restaurant City is a time sponge.

Ten Things You’d Want To Do
…because you can’t really lose in Restaurant City, so you don’t really need anything if you just plan to get by.

Be cheap until you can afford not to.
Simply put, an expensive chair does not work any better than the cheapest chair. You’ll need every dollar for the expansion of your restaurant so don’t waste money on atomic stoves or pretty tiles at the beginning.

Pick up that trash.
Picking up trash nets you one gold piece, not to mention a reward. The gold has obvious uses, but the reward is pretty much a free obstacle for your restaurant. Feel free to force your customers to walk around it before they get to their tables.

Shake the trees.
You can shake the trees outside your restaurant (in Restaurant Mode, not in Street Mode) by clicking on them, and they’ll drop a gold coin from time to time. There’s a legend that you can actually get ingredients this way. It seems to be extremely rare, because I’ve never gotten anything other than coins.

You can never have too many chairs.
Whenever you have some extra money, just buy one of the cheapest chairs and cram it anywhere you can. Customers who can’t find tables would sit on extra chairs for a while, hopefully long enough for a table to become free. In any case, you can make your mazes out of extra chairs, too.

Keep the customers wandering.
Make mazes out of extra chairs, the mailbox, and your rewards. The longer your customers take while getting to their seats, the longer your staff has to clear up the last customer.

Encourage lazy waiters.
The best way to run a restaurant is to place the tables as close to the stoves as possible so the waiter just needs to turn around to get things done. I don’t know if this is true in real life, but it certainly makes sense because people should go to restaurant to eat and nothing else.

Keep the window open.
No, not the restaurant windows. You can have no windows and it won’t matter. I mean the Restaurant City window. If you close it, your slaves still get tired and you still earn money, but you don’t get Gourmet Points. Keeping the application open even when you’re not there makes sure that you gain levels.

Water, all day.
The moment your slaves reach 80%, give them a glass of water. This way, you make sure that they work at optimal performance. And yeah, this means that your slaves are happy with a sip once in a while. They really are the perfect underlings.

Trade ingredients like crazy.
The only way to level up faster is to pour ingredients into your dishes. You get lots of ingredients, but at first you just need to level a dish or two so concentrate on those instead of trying to get as many dishes as possible. High-leveled dishes net you more Gourmet Points, so gather as many units of the ingredient you currently need and trade the rest.

Have them poop in public.
What can you do? The game defies your desire to provide proper toilet accommodations. If you don’t have toilets, customers who want to take a dump won’t give you popularity points. Again, the other customers won’t mind at all, so go ahead.