Best Free Cooking and Restaurant Games Online

Cooking and restaurant games make you the person behind the counter: orders come in, you prepare them, you serve them before the customer loses patience. The pace is fast, the controls are simple and the pressure is just right. These are the cooking games on PlayKovo and how to do well in them.

Race the clock in a tiny kitchen

Mini Chef Overcooked has you run a tiny kitchen and cook orders such as tomato soup and lemonade against the clock. You click or tap to play, and it is fully playable with touch on mobile. It is the most played game in the group and a fair introduction to the genre.

Cooking City is a desktop game where you click or tap ingredients, stations and dishes to prepare food, plate it and serve it fast enough to keep customers happy before anything burns.

Run the whole restaurant

My Perfect Restaurant has you run a restaurant kitchen: put dishes on trays, serve customers, upgrade and hire waiters. It sits between a cooking game and a management game, with the upgrades being the long-term goal. If you enjoy that, our tycoon guide goes further into running a business.

Cooking with a twist

Bingo Mania asks you to daub bingo cards to earn ingredients and cook your way through a kitchen tier list. It joins a number game and a cooking theme. ASMR Girl: Livestream Mukbang has you shop, cook and eat on camera as a mukbang streamer, growing your fan base with every bite. It is more of a role-play than a speed game, and its theme is about eating on stream, which some parents may want to look at first.

How to do well in a speed kitchen

1. Read the whole order first. Starting the wrong dish is the most common waste of time.
2. Start the slow things first. Anything that cooks while you do something else is free time. Start it, then use the gap.
3. Keep your counter clear. Clutter makes you misclick. Put finished dishes away at once.
4. Serve the customer who has waited longest. If the game shows a patience meter, use it.
5. Upgrade the bottleneck. If one station always has a queue, that is where the next upgrade goes.
6. Do not let anything burn. Burnt food costs both time and money.

Tips for touch screens

• Use a tablet or a large phone if you can. Small targets are harder to hit under pressure.
• Rest your hand so that you do not cover the orders.
• If a game supports a desktop, a mouse is usually faster than a finger for dragging items.

Which one first?

For more business games, read our idle and clicker guide.