What’s Cookin’?: Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! is Kind of a Capitalist Nightmare

Not many games have surprised me with their intros the way Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! did. The game, whose premise is a cross-country food truck road trip, starts by establishing that the US is being ravaged by war, but the economy, and particularly restaurants, are still booming. This includes  the titular Cook, Serve, Delicious…until it’s destroyed in a catastrophic bombing. 

This opening scene is shocking, but it’s also pivotal to the messaging of the rest of the game. You, as in the player character, are the former chef of Cook, Serve, Delicious, pulled from the post-attack debris by a pair of rescue robots named Whisk and Cleaver. Immediately after saving you, Whisk decides that the only way for you to move forward from this traumatic event is to just get right back to work. They convert their rescue-mobile into a food truck, and it’s back to the grind.

From the jump, you as The Chef are expected to perform. Even the tutorial levels have requirements to hit gold medal status (meaning a perfect run with only happy and ecstatic customers), and both Whisk and Cleaver are quick to remind the Chef that they could have done better. And despite how things may seem at first, perfection will come to be expected as standard.

To unlock all of the routes available on each part of the map, you have to start earning gold medals. To earn a gold on a level, you basically have to internalize a “customer is always right” attitude to the extreme, as anything less than speedy, stellar service will leave you with underwhelmed guests. Despite the game having a “chill mode,” it’s impossible to earn any rank higher than a silver, so you will have to play standard if you want gold medals. Eventually, progress is completely tied to your ability to reach perfection, and anything less will slow you down considerably. 

While I’ve personally enjoyed the game—despite its shockingly high difficulty level—the obsession with speed, efficiency, and perfection has remained grating. It’s not lost on me that you’re constantly being either cheered or chided about your productivity and skill by two robots. While you are eventually given a chance to walk away, you can’t finish the game that way. If you want to reach the end, you have to buckle down and work. 

Part of me is hoping that by the end there will be some kind of reckoning with this, but it’ll probably be a while until I see it since I’m still doing my best to grind out golds out on the road.