Cooking Rush — Burger Counter Chaos

What is Cooking Rush?

Cooking Rush is a real-time cooking game set behind a busy burger counter. Customers sit down at three stools, each with an order hanging over their head — a plain burger, a cheeseburger, a garden burger with lettuce and tomato, a double — and, on later days, a side of fries or a soda. You have ninety seconds per day to keep them all fed. Patties go on a two-spot grill and need five seconds to cook, but only six more seconds before they burn. Toppings go straight onto your plate. When the plate matches an order, you tap that customer and get paid: the price of the meal plus a tip that shrinks the longer they waited.

It is a game about juggling. You are never doing just one thing: a patty is cooking for the customer on the left while you stack a bun and cheese for the customer in the middle and keep one eye on the fryer for the one on the right. Every customer's patience bar is ticking down, and a customer who runs out walks away without paying a cent. The kitchen itself is simple and fair — every timer is visible, nothing is random once a customer sits down — so the only thing between you and three stars is how smoothly you sequence your taps. Unlike our slower-paced Café Manager, which is about planning a business, Cooking Rush is about your hands.

How to Play

The counter's house rules:

• a wrong plate is refused — the customer loses a quarter of their patience and the plate stays with you;
• a customer whose patience runs out walks out and pays nothing;
• burnt patties and fries can only go in the bin — tap them to clear the spot;
• the order you stack items in does not matter, but every item must be there and nothing extra.

Cooking Rush Tips & Strategy

We tuned the star goals by letting automated cooks play each day over a hundred times at different speeds. The fast ones that earned three stars all shared the same habits.

1. Always have a patty on the grill

   Every burger on the menu needs at least one patty, and a patty takes five seconds no matter how fast your fingers are. So the grill should never sit empty: the moment you take a cooked patty off, drop a fresh one on. With a six-second window before it burns, a spare patty almost always finds a home on the next order. Cooks who only start a patty when they need one spend most of the day waiting on the grill.

2. Build while it cooks

   Those five grill seconds are free time. While the patty cooks, stack the bun and toppings for the same order, start the fries or pour the soda. When the patty turns green, it should be the last thing the plate needs. Working in that order — start the slow thing, then do the quick things — is the single biggest difference between two-star and three-star days.

3. Serve the most impatient customer first

   Tips shrink as patience drains, and a walk-out costs you the whole bill. When several orders are waiting, work on the one whose patience bar is lowest, not the one that sat down first or the one that is easiest to make. Speed is worth more on a nearly-empty bar, and saving a customer from walking out is worth more than any tip.

4. Bin a wrong plate, don't force it

   If you add the wrong topping, don't try to find a customer it might fit — and never tap a customer hoping it is right, because a refused plate costs them a quarter of their patience. Bin it immediately and restart. Toppings are instant; the only thing worth protecting on a plate is a cooked patty, so on a mistake that includes one, it is usually still quicker to bin and re-grill than to gamble.

How Timers, Tips and Stars Work

Every station runs on a visible timer. A patty is raw until 5 seconds, cooked from 5 until 11, and burnt after that — the bar under each grill spot shows where it is. The fryer takes 4 seconds and burns at 10; the soda machine pours in 2 and the drink waits forever. Customers arrive every few seconds while a stool is free, with less patience and shorter gaps on later days. Day 5 is a genuine rush: customers arrive every three and a half to five seconds and wait only 23 seconds before giving up.

Payment is the menu price of every item on the order — a patty is 3 coins, fries and sodas 2, buns and toppings 1 — plus a tip of up to 60% of that bill, scaled by the share of patience the customer had left when served. A customer served instantly tips the full 60%; one served on their last second tips nothing. Each day's star goals were set from automated test runs: a cook averaging about half a second per tap with smart pre-grilling earns three stars almost every time, a steady cook at under a second per tap lands two, and even a slow, careful cook can earn the one star that unlocks the next day.

Cooking Rush vs Other Restaurant Games

Restaurant games split into two families. Management games like our Café Manager and Bakery Tycoon are about decisions over time: menus, prices, staff, growth. Time-management games are about the next ten seconds: which order, which station, which tap. Cooking Rush is firmly the second kind — there is no shop, no upgrades and nothing to plan between days except your own technique — which makes it a cousin of the arcade games on vygam as much as the simulators.

That focus keeps every day short and replayable. Ninety seconds is long enough for the counter to get genuinely hectic and short enough that a bad day is a quick retry rather than a lost evening. Your best stars and coins for each day are saved, so chasing a clean sweep of fifteen stars is a natural long-term goal. If you enjoy the rhythm of juggling several timers at once, you may also like Whack-a-Mole for pure reaction speed or Idle Farm for timers at a far gentler pace.

FAQ

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