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- Aluminium Christmas Trees:
- Casu marzu. While this cheese isn't used as a wine flavor like the game suggests, such a variety of cheese does exist. And it's a little squickier than the game implies
. - One would be forgiven for thinking the ingredients list for King Cake including "Baby" (a little plastic toy baby) is a goofy part of how dangerous the world has become, mentioning the choking hazard in the item descriptions, whereas most descriptions are already made-up jokes. Real King Cakes actually are traditionally made with a tiny plastic toy inside but this practice has been mostly phased out in most countries due to the aforementioned choking hazard.
- Casu marzu. While this cheese isn't used as a wine flavor like the game suggests, such a variety of cheese does exist. And it's a little squickier than the game implies
- Awesome Music: "It's Dangerous to Go Alone", the theme song for the third game. A song about driving through the war-torn ruins of America has never sounded so catchy and upbeat.
- Breather Level:
- The Fried and Carnival Iron Cook challenges in the first game. Compared to the American and Italian challenges which overloaded you with orders with tons of ingredients and food that needed to be cooked and then prepped, the small pool of ingredients and small amount of prep work in the next two challenges make then almost effortless by comparison even with rapid-fire orders and little to no order patience.
- In the sequel, Slammy's Old-Fashioned BBQ generally has easier shifts than other restaurants at similar levels, thanks to most of the foods being simple to prepare.
- Firekickers is also significantly easier than Esteban's, the restaurant that immediately precedes it (see Difficulty Spike below), featuring much simpler menu items with far fewer "gotcha" ingredients. One can easily gold-medal the entire former restaurant in less time than it takes to gold-medal just the final three shifts of the latter.
- After the nightmares that are Burrito Time and Contrast Coffee, Planet Blue and Sub Solutions are a welcome break. Both feature fairly simple dishes and a somewhat relaxed pace compared to the highly difficult foods in Burrito Time and the insanely fast pace of Contrast Coffee.
- Secrets of the Deep and Absolutely are surprisingly easy given how late in the Chef 4 Hire campaign they appear - the latter in particular has several shifts where the only ways not to get a gold medal are either to screw up a drink order or to let an order or chore expire, something which is next to impossible given the glut of sides at your disposal. However, these are just the calm before the storm that is Sebucosto, UEIYAV, and Executive's Decision, the final three restaurants in the campaign which are very much worthy of their end-game status.
- In CSD3, nearly any level that doesn't have a minimum point requirement is this, since there's nothing stopping you from just picking the easiest dishes from the choices available and calling it a day. This combined with "Entire Menu" in particular can be a godsend, since you end up with literally no restrictions on what you can serve. It is, however, a terrible way to make money.
- Mobile, Alabama is incredibly easy for being the third-to-last city in CSD3. Most of the shifts have the "Autoserved" theme, which, as the name suggests, limits your menu choices to foods that can be auto-served. Because of this, these shifts tend to be an absolute breeze - the only way to fail is either to screw up a Special Order or to have an order's patience expire, something which you'd have to go out of your way to have happen due to how auto-serve foods work. Even the few shifts that don't use this theme tend to be a great deal easier than similar shifts which come before or after Mobile. Furthermore, for the first and only time, no new shift mechanics or food truck attack types are introduced, and the city as a whole is fairly short at only 23 shifts (where most others clock in at around 30 or more). It's a nice opportunity to easily breeze through an entire city and catch your breath before the fiendishly difficult Nashville and Iron Cook Speedway.
- Speaking of the Iron Cook Speedway, the Sippy Cup is this: each race is relatively short at a mere 4 laps, none of the races have a point minimum* , and, most importantly, it's the only stage that has just a single food truck attack per race (as opposed to the others having at least two).
- Complacent Gaming Syndrome: The game goes out of its way to avert this:
- Most of the easy and/or high-earning dishes will start to generate negative buzz if left on the menu for longer than two consecutive days. This forces players either to change strategies constantly, or go with Staple dishes which tend to be less lucrative or, in the case of Soup, incredibly difficult to make properly.
- Certain events, like bets, Cook4Luv dates, and VIP visits, will require you to have certain dishes on your menu. Not having the correct dish(es) counts as an automatic failure.
- The third game has restrictions for your menu on almost every level, such as requiring a certain amount of points in your total menu or having to stick to certain foods. This makes it rather difficult for the player to choose dishes they're familiar with.
- Contested Sequel: While the vastly expanded food choices and the new Chef 4 Hire mode have received nearly universal praise, there is heated debate on whether CSD2’s main restaurant mode is a worthy successor to the original game. Some enjoy the new version for being more streamlined with fewer distractions and gimmicks, whereas others feel it to be so stripped down in comparison to the original that there's no reason to play it over the more engaging, fleshed-out Chef 4 Hire.
- Difficulty Spike: Earning a new star activates an automatic 30% Buzz increase for the three days following. Those three days will likely be significantly more difficult than the days leading up to attaining said star.
- Esteban's in the sequel. Sandwiched between the simple, straightforward Pie Right and the comparatively simple Firekickers, Esteban's is a nightmare of complex, multi-ingredient foods loaded with multiple prep/cooking steps and insidious "gotcha" ingredients with unintuitive default key assignments. It starts out simple enough, but towards the end it reaches maddening levels of difficulty that will test the skill and patience of even the most seasoned CSD veterans. Burrito Time, added in the Barista update, also qualifies due to having many of the same foods that makes Esteban's such a nightmare, including having the dreaded Burritos on every single shift.
- As of the Barista update, Contrast Coffee is a particularly nasty one. While many of the new menu items are fairly straightforward (espresso shots in particular are literally one ingredient), nearly all of them have extremely short cook times (said espresso shots go from started to overcooked in about eight seconds), requiring intense babysitting of your prep station queue to ensure nothing gets ruined. Even worse, the final two shifts use thirteen and fourteen prep stations respectively; the only other restaurants that ever go above twelve are UEIYAV and Executive's Decision, the final two restaurants in Chef 4 Hire. If you can manage to all-gold Contrast Coffee (and see That One Achievement to get an idea of how monumentally difficult a task this is), most of the remainder of Chef 4 Hire will likely pose little challenge for you.
- Ending Fatigue: Getting the platinum five-star ranking. Provided you've been keeping up on purchasing all the food, keeping it upgraded and finishing all the extra events as they become available, you'll be left with nothing to do but sit through another 20 days.
- Fridge Horror: On your first shift in Marietta, OK, Cleaver recalls a story during the Blue War where she tore off a robot's arm and then beat it to death with its own arm. On the surface, it sounds rather hilarious. However, when you remember that the robots in this world are borderline sentient beings, you realize that it's not all that different than if a person were to talk about doing the same thing to another human being. Suddenly, Whisk has damn good reason to be horrified with how flippantly Cleaver tells the tale.
- Game-Breaker: While nearly all of the truck upgrades in 3 that aren't simply an extra prep or holding station are highly useful, the Serving Cloner is in a level all its own. Each level increases the maximum number of servings for all Holding Station dishes by one, up to a maximum of six. Suddenly, foods whose primary drawback is their low serving amount become complete non-issues, and foods that already have high serving amounts start lasting practically forever. Combine with a decently leveled Rejuvenator and/or Heat Lamp, and you'll rarely find yourself having to worry about running out of servings or foods going bad ever again, which can help break the later levels of the game wide open.
- Good Bad Bugs: The first game has one specific to burgers; if you start a day with them on the menu, but then quit midway through, the game will, for some reason, stop registering that burgers are on your menu for certain purposes. On the upside, they'll no longer be subject to Menu Rot, meaning you can keep them on the menu indefinitely as long as you don't remove them. On the downside, it will cause special events dependent on burgers, like Cook4Luv dates, VIP visits, and bets, to fail, since the game thinks you haven't added them to your menu (though this can be remedied simply by removing and then immediately re-adding them).
- Hilarious in Hindsight: One of the emails in the first game regards someone who's sick of waiting for "HL3" to be released. Then the sequels reveal that the series takes place in the late 2030s-early 2040s. Poor guy's got every right to complain, considering he's been waiting for over thirty frickin' years.
- It Was His Sled: It's fairly common knowledge at this point that five platinum stars is the highest possible restaurant rating, and that a clan of ninjas is responsible behind the Mysterious Golden Tickets.
- Obvious Beta: CSD2 originally shipped with a plethora of bugs and missing features, making it feel very bareboned in comparison to the first game. It wasn't until the 1.5 update, released a few months after the game came out, that most of the missing content was finally restored.
- Porting Disaster: While not as bad as most examples, the mobile version of the first game lags significantly behind the Steam version in terms of content and updates. Among the laundry list of issues: the texting minigame still has the absurdly long delay between texts (see Scrappy Mechanic below), both CookBet and Extreme Difficulty are entirely missing, and some of the ingredents and recipes use outdated names and/or contain misspellings that have been fixed on the Steam version.
- Scrappy Mechanic:
- The Guide Dang It! example involving the Robbery chore. The minigame seems nearly impossible until one notices how the interface for this minigame works. It also renders a perfect day in Extreme Difficulty virtually impossible due to the fact that robberies typically happen right at the start of (Super) Rush Hour, when orders and other chores start pouring in and you simply don't have time to deal with the Robbery chore's cumbersome interface. If you're shooting for a Perfect Day, hearing those gunshots is pretty much your signal to give up and restart.
- The girlfriend/boyfriend texts, since they take several seconds to reply to each and you can't put the phone down until the conversation is over, meaning you will almost certainly break your combo. A post-release patch attempted to alleviate this by significantly reducing the delay between texts (though only for the Steam version).
- The "20 days of service" requirement for earning stars. It makes earning that next star feel like more of a grind than an accomplishment, especially considering that most players will have achieved all of the other star requirements long before this one. Apparently the creator agrees, since earning stars in the sequel uses more of an experience-based system, allowing players to rank up as quickly as their skill level allows them to.
- In CSD2, the sheer volume of chores one is assaulted with. It's not uncommon for the serving of a single order to generate up to four chores at once, and because chores decay much faster than orders most of the time, shifts tend to devolve into "serve dish, fight off chores, serve dish, fight off chores, repeat ad nauseum", especially during rush hours. The biggest offenders are the Trash and Dishes chores, since not only are they the most time-consuming, but they're also the most frequent of the lot, meaning that while you're dealing with them, orders or even other chores are slipping away before your eyes, and you may even have two trash or dishes chores queued up at the same time! While as of the 1.5 update you can purchase equipment upgrades to reduce the frequency of chores in CSD mode, these don't help you when it comes to Chef 4 Hire, in which any shift with more than about 70% initial buzz feels less like "Cook, Serve, Delicious" and more like "Cook, Serve, Chores". On the whole, it ends up feeling like Fake Difficulty at its most blatant, making it no wonder that much of the fandom heaved a sigh of relief upon learning that CSD3 jettisons chores altogether.
- Also in CSD2, the restaurant mode descriptions mislead you into believing that Super Rush Hours are exclusive to Stress Mode. In reality, Super Rush Hours are triggered by your Buzz reaching 150%, meaning that once it hits that threshold, they will start happening in any mode (barring Zen by virtue of eliminating Rush Hours altogether). This has the nasty side effect of rendering Classic Mode - ostensibly the mode that most veterans of the first game will naturally gravitate towards - virtually unplayable. Due to the way Buzz accumulates, most players (especially skilled players and those who try to maximize their Buzz via boosters) will find themselves hitting the 150% mark after only a dozen or so shifts, leaving them in for a nasty surprise once they get slapped with a Super Rush Hour and their performance subsequently tanks due to their menu being literally impossible to serve under the single second of patience Super Rush Hours invoke. The only way to avoid this is either to deliberately perform poorly in order to lower Buzz from bad orders, or to load up the menu with detractors that negatively affect Buzz, both of which fly directly in the face of what most players would logically do.
- Sequel Difficulty Spike:
- Compare the early days of the first game with the early stages of the sequel's Chef For Hire mode. You may start panicking now.
- The third game ramps up quickly, starting from the second stage onwards.
- Surprisingly Improved Sequel: While 2 felt to many fans like a step backwards for the series due to its general reliance on Fake Difficulty and its lack of a sense of progression in comparison to the first game, 3 improved on both games in nearly every conceivable aspect. The overwhelming majority of the community has crowned it the best game in the entire trilogy as a result.
- Tear Jerker: On the road out of Kansas, Whisk reminisces about her days as a driver during the Blue War, and how her squadmates used to call her "Worthless Whisk" for getting them lost all the time, before coming to the conclusion that she probably deserved it. Even Cleaver - who, mind you, gleefully admits to beating another robot to death with its own arm just moments after this conversation takes place - feels sorry for her... and you probably will, too.
- Cleaver spends much of the early parts of the game reminiscing about her hometown of New Orleans, leading her to become quite excited when Whisk reveals that it’s their next stop after Dallas. The thing is, it’s apparently been a while since Cleaver’s visited, as she’s clearly not prepared for the blasted, irradiated wasteland that awaits her. It’s notably the only time in the entire game that Cleaver sounds noticeably distraught, and it’s not hard to see why.
- That One Achievement:
- CSD2 has the "Stress Chef Supreme" achievement, which requires you to maintain at least 150% Buzz throughout an entire shift in Stress Mode. This doesn't sound so bad... until you realize that even a single botched order knocks your Buzz down by nearly 20%, whereas it takes several Perfect orders just to raise it by one percent. This basically requires you to have a perfect run through Stress Mode, with maybe a single mistake allowed towards the tail end of the day. Without cheesing your way through with extremely simple menu items (dishes like brisket, ham, turkey, and sausage slices come to mind) and three instant-ready sides to boost your patience level at the start of the day (and even this won't help you during the Super Rush Hours), this is flat-out impossible... and even with such a menu, it's still one of the most frustrating objectives to complete.
- From the same game, "Espresso Chef", awarded for getting a Gold medal on the final shift of Contrast Coffee. Refer to Difficulty Spike above for just why this is so maddeningly difficult - to put it in perspective, fewer than one percent of all players have managed to pull it off.
- "Secret Ninja", the achievement for gold-medaling the final shift of Sushi Nest, isn't much better. Only one percent of players have managed it, and for good reason: it requires intense micromanaging of your Holding Stations and absolute mastery of the sushi dish in order to pull off. Yet even that won't help you when it comes to sashimi orders, which are surprisingly easy to screw up due to all of the "S" ingredients necessitating unintuitive keybinds for most of them.
- That One Attack: While nearly all of the food truck attacks in 3 are irritating in their own way, three stand out from the rest:
- The UEIYAV attack disables Today's Menu, meaning you can no longer see what customers are going to order at the next stop and plan ahead accordingly. Once this attack hits, you're basically forced to cram all of your Holding Stations with whatever food you can muster and pray to the culinary gods that you don't run out mid-stop. What's more, the Iron Cook Speedway absolutely loves throwing this one at you, so have fun flying blind for half your races!
- The Max Wieners attack cuts the amount of time your Holding Station foods stay fresh in half. This is a major setback under any circumstances since you'll have to prepare extras of everything mid-stop (assuming you even have the Holding Station space to do so) to ensure you don't suddenly find yourself out of a complex food with customer patience slipping away. Got foods like Sisig and Senicillo Tacos that already have short freshness periods as it is? You might as well just go back and change your menu, as otherwise those foods will start to become a massive pain in the posterior as the day progresses.
- The Sushi Nest attack is one of the most devastating, as it disables three of your other truck upgrades: your Heat Lamps, your Serving Cloner, and your Special System Analyzer. This means three things: your Holding Station foods will go bad much faster (and woe betide you if this is paired with the aforementioned Max Wieners attack in the Iron Cook Speedway), you'll have less of each food to serve at each stop (though, thankfully, the first round of this can be mitigated by preparing a fresh batch of each dish before the attack hits), and your Special Order patience will start to decay as soon as you arrive at your next stop (or, in the case of VIP orders, as soon as they come in). This effectively kneecaps your ability to serve more complex orders, especially if it hits early in the shift.
- That One Level:
- From the first game:
- Soups have the most ingredients out of any dish, and certain ingredients have to be chopped as opposed to just dropping them in the pot. Fortunately, the number of recipes is limited, so a little memorization goes a long way.
- Shish Kabobs have a special requirement that no two of any ingredient can touch one another. It requires a surprising amount of planning ahead, in a game that places a heavy emphasis on speed. That being said, because the number of recipes is limited as with nearly every other dish in the game, skilled players can figure out and memorize working combinations for each one, thus significantly cutting down on the difficulty factor.
- Nachos cook like burgers (cook meat first, then put the ingredients together and serve). When fully upgraded, however, they have more ingredients than burgers* , yet they sell for less than half of the price* . Because of this, there would normally be no reason to put nachos on the menu if you already have burgers, but certain events (like Cook4Luv dates and VIP visits) require that you have them. You can expect those days to be a living nightmare, especially with high Buzz.
- The Robbery chore, besides being Guide Dang It!, is also frustrating because unlike most other chores which have linear straightforward keypresses (press once to do a thing once, press again to do it again) the Robbery just cycles through a bunch of options with no pattern, meaning besides checking the 'order' section on the bottom to see what you have to do you also need to look at the options on the right to see what you've selected. If you play with the keyboard there's an added layer of difficulty since the keys try to be mnemonic but only work halfway (in particular, 'Y' for "eyes" and 'F' for "facial hair"), so you end up hitting 'E' and accidentally change the ear or 'H' and accidentally change the hair. It's probably wise to remap the keys to QWEASD and forget about the mnemonic, or switch to the mouse.
- From the second game:
- CSD2 has the dreaded burritos, a dish which just screams Fake Difficulty. Not only does it have dozens of recipes and have several ingredients with unintuitive default key bindings (one example: corn chips are assigned to H for some reason), but it is absolutely loaded with "gotcha" ingredients whose sole purpose is to trip you up. Have fun spotting the difference between trick ingredient pairings like "chicken fajitas" and "breaded chicken", "white rice" and "black rice", and "pinto beans" and "black beans", and remembering which key goes with which ingredient, all in the span of mere seconds you'll have to serve it up. And just to add insult to injury, burritos are one of the worst contributors to trash, with it taking no more than four orders before a trash chore is coming your way. The inclusion of this dish is the single biggest contributing factor to the off-the-charts difficulty of the final few shifts of Esteban's and especially Burrito Time; not only do burritos tend to be served alongside other tough items, but the ungodly amounts of trash piling up mean you could very easily be staring down upwards of three trash chores in your queue at the same time.
- Biggs Burger Shift 9. 11 prep stations, 8 holding stations, 90% Buzz, and an extremely short patience level with no side dishes to boost it mean you're in for quite the ride.note
- From the third game:
- Any level with the "Burgers and Patties" theme, which limits your menu choices to burgers, chicken sandwiches, and breakfast sandwiches. It requires a ton of ingredients properly placed, and missing even one will lock you out of a perfect score, making any level with it significantly tougher than most others. Quite notably, if a gold medal is obtained on the first shift to use this theme exclusively, it unlocks a decoration screaming "no more burgers!"
- There's also the "Fiesta!" theme, which, as you might guess, limits your menu choices to Mexican foods. If you want to earn a decent amount of money/experience, you'll have to put tacos and the aforementioned burritos on your menu. Fortunately, the gameplay overhauls in 3 make these much more manageable than in the previous game; not only is the amount of each dish you'll have to make drastically reduced due to them only appearing in between stops, but the chore problems these dishes presented in 2 are gone entirely. Even with all of this, you'll still have an uphill battle on your hands, since it does nothing to alleviate how insanely difficult prepping these foods is.
- Any level with the "Angry Customers" modifier, which sends order patience into the red zone as soon as they come in. Cramming your Holding Stations with foods that have complex prep stages is flat-out suicidal on these shifts, since you'll end up spending so much time prepping that orders will start slipping away faster than you can serve them. Your only hope is to pack your Holding Stations with as many "instant serve" foods as humanly possible, filling any remaining slots with dishes that have minimal prep involved. Got a menu theme that doesn't allow for this strategy? Prepare to lose copious amounts of hair.
- Route C of Newer Orleans is titled "Endless Screaming". You'll quickly learn it's called this for good reason, as every single stop is absolutely loaded with orders, giving you zero time to catch your breath. There are five shifts of this, three of which also come with reduced order patience. By the time you're done, you'll probably be joining in with the screaming yourself.
- The Medium Cup w/ Ice is by far the most difficult stage in the Iron Cook Speedway barring the Champion Cup. Each race is a whopping 8 laps, each lap alternates between a Sprint and a Super Sprint (meaning minimal prep time between stops), every race has a 30-point minimum, and every odd-numbered lap has a food truck attack coming your way* . If you can get through this stage, most of the rest of the ICS will pose little trouble for you.
- From the first game:
