Tiny Chef

One kitchen. Ten hours. Four cooks who won't stop moving the stove.

Tiny Chef is a co-op restaurant management game. You open the doors, customers sit down, and from that moment you are behind. Chop, fry, plate, run it to the table, take the next order on the way back. Somewhere in there the fryer catches fire and nobody has washed a plate since Tuesday.

Play alone, on one couch, or online with up to four people.

The shift

Every day runs on a real clock. Demand rises and falls with the hour, so the lunch rush is a different game than the dead stretch at 3pm. Customers arrive alone or in parties of up to four, sit together, order together, and lose patience together. Serve the table late and the whole party walks.

Nothing about the kitchen is fixed. Pick up the chopping board and carry it somewhere better. Buy a second stove off your phone and wait two days for the truck. Fires spread to the next counter if you don't get there in time.

The rest of the day

The shift is only part of it. Between services you drive back to HQ, sleep until whatever hour you choose, and spend the money you made:

• Order appliances and gadgets by phone and unload the delivery truck yourself
• Learn new dishes and decide which ones stay on the menu
• Run ad campaigns to pull in more customers than you can handle
• Hire contractors to knock out walls, move doors and rebuild the floor plan
• Buy the empty lot next door and grow the building into it
• Book a cleaning crew when you really do not want to face the sink

Do well enough and you open a second restaurant. Then a third. Fail enough orders in one day and the health inspector shuts one down, and reopening costs more the longer you've been running.

Your cook is yours

Make a character, pick their face and clothes, and take them anywhere. Skills go from 1 to 99 and only go up by doing the work. Chop a thousand onions and you chop faster. Fight enough fires and you stop being scared of the fryer. Your  character carries that progress into any save and into anyone else's game.

Co-op that actually shares the kitchen

Online through Steam, or two players on one screen with controllers. Everyone cooks, everyone can buy things, everyone can move the furniture while you're standing on it. There is one phone and whoever grabbed it first is using it.

Also, there is a bed and a car

You have to drive to work. You have to sleep. You will, at some point, open the restaurant and immediately be told you cannot start the shift because there is one dirty plate on a table. That one is on you.