While my American friends are celebrating the 4th of July, I spent my long weekend for Canada day (July 1st) playing video games, knitting, reading, and just relaxing over all. I’ve never been a big one for crowds, and I thought it would be best to just stay home.
That meant lots of time with my Sims 4 legacy family (their last name is Little, in case I haven’t mentioned it yet). They decided to do something a bit.. drastic. Their home was worth around $160,000 and I downsized it and emptied all but the essential rooms so that they could purchase their very own restaurant. That’s right, the Little’s are now property owners (well, besides the house). The ability to purchase and run a restaurant came with the ‘Dine Out’ expansion, and until now I’ve never owned any of the restaurants, I just had my sims visit them (which was pretty fun). Unfortunately this is where the expansion falls short (IMO).
Your sim (and their family) can’t actually work at the restaurant unless you do some fancy modifications to your town – something I don’t want to do as I’m playing this as a legacy game (with as little involvement and modification as possible). They can mange it – but that’s it. I was hoping my Sims with high cooking could get in on the action to help turn the place around. No such luck.
Basically you head to the restaurant whenever you want, open it (if it’s closed) and hang around greeting people and doing a few chores here and there. You can offer patrons free meals, drinks, discuss what they think of the place, and other owner-like activities. You can help clean up, and you manage your staff. You can train the staff, give them raises, praise them, fire them, or tell them they’re doing a shitty job. You can customize the outfits everyone has to wear for work (be careful with this, I customized my female wait staff and suddenly they were all naked for the duration of the opening..) and you have the choice of either building a restaurant from the ground up, or using the gallery or a pre-fabricated place.
The restaurant can stay open while your sim goes back home to do some essentials like sleep and eat, but if you leave it open too long your staff gets cranky (they need to go home too after all), and bad things can happen. I wish you could set hours at the place, so it would open automatically from say noon to 10pm or something. It’s basically a job that isn’t really a job. The “goal” is to raise your standing. I started out as a one star establishment and after a few days of running things I’ve clawed my way to 3.5 stars.
It doesn’t make a lot of money, so I wouldn’t suggest this as the main job of the family (yet). There are also quite a few glitches. Once night the place got really busy and so everyone sat down at the bar. That’s where they stayed for the next 12 hours, no one moved, no one was seated at a proper table, no one ordered anything. I ended up closing the place and re-opening it to fix the weird glitch of no one moving.
My sims don’t regret giving up their posh lifestyle to run their new restaurant into the ground, after all change is nice even if it doesn’t work out quite the way you imagined it would – but future families may think twice. It’s a shame because I feel that ‘dine out’ has so much potential that just remains untapped and it could have been so much more than what was given. Still, it is pretty neat to take your sims out for a meal, I’ve had no issues with that portion and enjoyed it quite a bit.
As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!