@elulu8 Yes, I have Dine Out... I have all packs. 😁
A few things that are helpful to keep in mind as you run your restaurant:
- Your sim will be the manager of the restaurant, and it will run better if they're on-site. I oftentimes even take a couple of my Sims to the restaurant to manage things. The manager will have greeting and additional interactions that come up which will increase the quality of the customer's experience. As you do better, you earn more perks/points, and can hire additional staff or add other features or interactions that will enhance the restaurant's quality, efficiency, and customer experience.
- Start off slowly. Stay a bit behind what your staff is skilled for in work load and food offerings (skill needed to offer which items on the menu). Your staff will slowly increase in skills, and you can gradually enhance your offerings. Keep the menu a couple of tiers in skill below the least experienced cooks' skill level until they're top-notch. Your customers will be far more impressed with high quality food that requires a lower skill level than poorly prepared fancy food.
- Interact with the staff. Encouraging them, paying for training, etc., goes a long way. Don't forget to give them raises, and don't keep them there overly long or they will be unhappy.
- Help with clearing tables and keeping things neat.
- Make sure you are not overloading the staff. Greatly reduce the tables available at first and slowly increase them as you can add more staff. For instance, I think each waiter can only handle 3-5 tables. You will have to test to see. and you will need additional cook(s) if you increase tables, also.
- Keep reasonable hours. As related above, if you stay open too late, employees get tired and unhappy - or worse.
- Customers enjoy a pleasant atmosphere. If your sim sings well, I have even added a mic or karaoke machine and have my sims sing, play an instrument if they have skill, etc. sometimes. Or you can add speakers for music, a fireplace, etc.
- Lock the kitchen to customers or they will pester your chefs.
- You may want to add a separate employee bathroom with a door locked to customers.
- Don't put any tables in a break room or they may count as a restaurant table that the customer cannot reach.
- I usually hire one more waiter and one more cook than I can get by with. (Sorry - kind of repetitive of the above points.) This gives some flexibility for if one is slacking off a bit, or the occasional no-show.
- If you remember to save your game before you open the restaurant - and before you leave your lot to go there, if you have a no-show employee (especially if it's the host or if you only have one cook or waiter - so you cannot open), you will then have the option of exiting the game without saving and then re-enter and go in again. Almost always things are normal after doing this for me. (In other words, the no-show shows up.)
- Running the restaurant well is a lot of work for quite a while, but eventually they all improve in skills and you get the swing of balancing things also.
- If you're having issues with an employee, get the employee's name and hunt them down in Manage Households. What are their traits? If they have bad traits for the job you could change their traits or fire them and hire someone else. I've sometimes put my staff all into a furnished home.
- There's a great Carl's Guide about restaurants here: https://www.carls-sims-4-guide.com/gamepacks/dineout/managing-your-restaurant.php
