Open for Dining: Restaurants

Welcome to the new dining experience: your shops can now become restaurants!

Shops in the cities and communes can turn into restaurants with the help of Chancellors and their aides, and manse shops can turn into restaurants through activation of the new restaurant miniature artifact (ASHOP 1344). Restaurants can turn back into shops through the same mechanic as well. See HELP RESTAURANTS for the full explanation.

Once you have a restaurant, as the owner you can adjust its many settings. The colour of the bins, the title of the menu, how and where food is delivered, the sit-down style of the restaurant, the type of the restaurant, the style of staff, and more. You could run a pub where the bartender slides drinks across the bar to the customer, or a fancy sit-down restaurant where food is presented upon a table by the waitstaff, or an outdoor food cart with no seating where the chef hands the food directly to the customers.

Restaurants use a stylised MENU to display their offerings rather than WARES, you have to ORDER there rather than BUY, and all REFILLs are served by the waitstaff. But don’t worry if your establishment serves a few extra items on the side. Anything that is not considered a restaurant item (food and drinks) will be handed to you rather than presented on a table for you to eat.

To make restaurants even more amazing and immersive, there is a large number of other updates alongside this release.

• Restaurant Staff – restaurants can hire staff that will serve at the establishment. This comes in the form of resumes you can browse and hire from, and the options depend on where you are hiring. An illithoid for hire in Celest is unlikely, but more common in Magnagora.

• Shop Ambients – manses can already do that through Marble Archways and Wonderclocks but now so can city and commune shops! Chancellors and their aides can set up to 5 ambients per shop and customize them to fire either during the day, night, or both, or be triggered by dawn, noon, dusk, nightfall, or midnight. This works for shops and restaurants.

• Favourites – declare your favourite foods and drinks and be reminded you love what you are eating and drinking with a colourful experience! FAVOURITES will let you set 5 foods and 5 drinks and choose a colour for the consumed/drank line. Setting a favourite is very flexible and you can set it just to “eggs”, which will then catch any food with the egg commodity or if eggs are mentioned in the design, or you could be very specific and set “*toasted coconut flakes*”, or if you want to love a certain design set “a bowl of garlic soup”, no asterisks. Those using screenreaders will also get an extra line to indicate a favourite in addition to the consumed being coloured.

• Eating Food – since restaurants can be customized to deliver food and drinks directly onto a furniture surface, you can now also EAT FOOD ON|FROM FURNITURE. Eat directly from the table anywhere!

• Looking for Restaurants – DIRECTORY and PORTAL SEARCH will mark restaurants with an asterisk by their name so you can spot them easily but you can also find them with the new DIRECTORY RESTAURANTS and PORTAL SEARCH RESTAURANTS.

• New Design Patterns – a release like this cannot come without some new things to design, especially as restaurants have an assortment of sitdown styles. Check out Crafts Post #526!
• Seasonal Bins – both shops and restaurants can now flag a bin for a specific season or seasons, and that bin will only show to customers if the criteria is met. PRICE BIN <#bin> SEASON <season> to set it up. PRICE BIN LIST will show you your current setup.
• Outdoor Restaurants – while manses could already do that, now restaurants can as well. Setting this will make the room require outdoor-suitable furniture and will destroy any indoor-flagged furniture though. Very few furniture pieces are outdoor-suitable by design but remember you can flag any furniture for the outdoors while designing it with DESIGN <sketch> OUTDOORS <ON|OFF> . You can also look for outdoor furniture with design search – for example: ARTISAN LARGETABLES OUTDOORS YES.
• Tipping – you can now tip in shops and restaurants! The gold will go directly into the owner’s stockroom and their shoplog, if they have one, will note your tip. If you are particularly pleased, you could even include a reason: TIP <number> GOLD [<reason>].
• Spotting Containers – all containers, be they regular items or furniture, will now have an asterisk next to them on IH (info here) if they have something inside. This only works for open containers! This will help you locate tables with food, but also chests with items inside. We considered appending extra information to the dropped/room text of the items but that is usually long enough already.

All of these changes will make it into the various help files over time as there is quite a lot to update here. A number of changelogs still need to be written with a full summary as well.

There is also a lot more to be done in the future! For example, right now staff cannot be hired for regular shops and do not come with an actual denizen for the room, but both are things we wish to do. For the latter, we need to make randomised generators of all available races and that is quite the undertaking. Ideally, we would have the staff allow the owner to tweak greetings, highlight specific wares, and even allow you to set their uniform by providing them with clothes.

Let’s eat!