Hot Dish

Hot Dish is a cooking simulator similar to the Cooking Mama series of games. As a training chef in a restaurant, the player has to prepare several dishes to be served to a food critic.

The recipes are selected at the beginning from a menu organized by food course: appetizers, entrees and deserts. The number of medals besides each entry in the menu shows the amount of steps required to make it.

Dishes are prepared by clicking and making motions at parts of the screen with the mouse. Like in real cooking, each recipe requires a number of steps: slicing vegetables, boiling water, browning meat, etc. These steps are grouped by recipe as windows in portions of the screen, and can be interacted simultaneously. A thermometer sits besides each steps group. It acts as a timer, its red mercury mark slowly going downwards as the dish temperature decreases. It can be reset upwards by successfully finishing a preparation step.

Some steps have a meter beneath them, mostly red with some green motion icons. Once clicked, a white bar starts to move from left to right. When it reaches the green portions, the player has to click and make the indicated motion with the mouse.

As the dishes get ready they receive a number of stars from the critic. New recipes can be bought with these stars, the more complex recipes being also the most expensive.

The health inspector visit happens between each cooking session. It's a standard tile-matching mini-game where the tiles have icons of cockroaches, rats and cleaning tools. Some tiles have a different color to indicate the inspector's field of vision. If any kitchen pest falls on these tiles, the mini-game ends. If the player reaches the required amount of points, the inspector gives one of the power-ups: a spatula that slows time, a secret sauce that increases quality and a blender that skips a step.

As the game progresses, the player switches between different restaurants, each with a different cuisine and a stereotypical chef.