Hiring & Training a Staff - Chefs, Waiters, and Hosts
From the main menu, a picture of the three types of restaurant staff in The Sims 4 Dine Out Game Pack
Restaurants require, at minimum, one waiter, one host, and one chef in order to operate. Their roles and the skills they need to perform effectively will vary. The early selection of staff is not great, but you can improve their skills and make them happier to work for your establishment. This will help your Sim to make more money, and help guests enjoy their meals. This guide will teach you basic and advanced concepts for handling your staff. Let's look at some of the common things between the three types of employment, and then look at the unique features of each job in the restaurant.
Manage Employees Press the manage employees button from the restaurant management menu (bottom right) at any time and you can access various commands, including hiring, firing, promoting and demoting.
Commonalities Between Host, Waiter, and Chef Employment Types
Promote staff who deserve it and share success together.
Opinion, Praising and Criticizing Beneath the worker's portrait is an opinion, which usually starts a 'Neutral'. The worker is neither satisfied nor unsatisfied with working for you. Check up on will give you the same information as looking at the manage employees menu. Sims who are being paid well will be 'Satisfied' or 'Very Satisfied', while they can also be 'Unsatisfied' and 'Very Unsatisfied'. There are two factors at play here. One, your treatment of them - are you praising good behavior, or calling them out for slacking? It seems as if there is a mechanic where if they ARE slacking and you call them on it by using the Criticize interaction, the relationship won't take as big a hit. They'll be extra-motivated for a while via a positive moodlet. If they're trying their best, you can make them ticked at you and lower their opinion of working for your establishment. Don't think they're staring at the phone the whole time, the waiters are usually checking orders.
The Praise Interaction encourages your employees to do better. Criticize may do more to whip them into action, but harms their job satisfaction.
The Praise interaction will give your worker a temporary positive moodlet that absolutely helps them with performance. You can't have the host being mean to the customer the moment they walk in the door. Additionally, and more importantly is their pay grade. When employees begin to develop their skills, they'll know they deserve more pay for what they do. A waiter with 5 ranks in charisma and fitness is going to grow dissatisfied with employment, and if you go too far they will quit. On the flip side, they will be generally happier and more likely to do a good job if satisfied and properly promoted. Each of the three careers has 5 levels for the employees and set amounts of pay.
Employees require skills to do a good job for you. Pay for training to help them learn faster. A nice touch by EA in my opinion.
Training & Skill Gains Your restaurant's employees require two types of skills each. Chefs require cooking and mixology, for example. Training employees means getting skill XP between shifts, while employees will also get natural skill experience just working for you. They'll gain about 1 level, depending where they stand. It's good to do early on to make your staff better as level 1-3 of each skill greatly limits their ability to do their jobs. There are three types of training available:
Brief Training - $150 - no requirement. Can help a new employee to catch up, but on-job experience is necessary to improve performance.
Standard Training - $600 - Requires level 5 in a Skill.
Extensive Training - $1500 - Requires level 7 in a skill.
Obviously, there are some gaps and staff will have to get on-the-job experience to fill them. It's better to do training as soon as it's available as the skill XP to level up grows greater as they progress, just as if you were leveling the skill with your own Sim. There are also good leaps from just a few levels in required skills.
Promoting & Demoting As a general rule of thumb, a Sim should probably be promoted at least every 3 levels in their skills or else they are going to being feeling dissatisfied. This also depends how often you praise them. Demote should only be used if you have a 'Very Satisfied' employee who shouldn't be. Note the relationship is going to take a hit, but relationships DO NOT factor into the satisfaction of an employee (perhaps, unless it goes negative). Overall you should probably prefer the carrot (reward), not the stick (punishment). I guess Sims are good at keeping business and friendship from conflicting.
Employee Types
Let's look at employee types in the order your guests will interact with them:
Host
Hosts greet and seat guests. Their first impression on you is huge.
The host basically represents the restaurant and puts customers in a good mood when they arrive. Hosts are responsible for seating and greeting the guests. The host is important as their first impression on the customer cannot be changed, so I made it a point to praise my host (and use inspirational speech once it was possible) to put them in a good mood and keep them on track. Don't interrupt them from seating, though. Get them right at the beginning of service and between waves of customers. You don't want long wait times just to tell them they're doing a good job. Find moments of downtime. This position relies on the Comedy and Charisma skills exclusively. Hosts' skills are much like waiters in that at lower skill levels - regardless of the praise moodlet - they are more likely to goof and make a bad impression on a guest. Raising them to at least level 5-6 will stop those bad impressions from happening so long as the host is in a good mood.
The host position is an expensive one, but you'll only ever need one host operating from a lone host station. The host station is best placed nearby to tables, like all others. If the host has to walk to the back and then upstairs, back to the front of the building, it's going to take guests much much longer to be seated than if they're right there. You may even consider placing them in the center of a group of tables. Hosts make the following per hour:
Host Level 1 - $3
Host Level 2 - $6
Host Level 3 - $12
Host Level 4 - $20
Host Level 5 - $30
Waiters and Waitresses
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Waiters clean up, take orders, and provide menus to guests. Station them throughout your restaurant.
At least one waiter is required, they use the waiter station and may idle near it when doing nothing - so keep it nearby to guests. You can zone out waiters this way. Waiters and Waitresses provide menus, cleanup, and finished meals to your customers. You can unlock 2 more waiter slots by purchasing related perks. Waiters are reliant on the Charisma and Fitness to do their job - charisma's role being obvious, but fitness having to do with how likely they are to drop a plate and their general energy levels. As Charisma and Fitness improve, the odds of a 'bad service' marker for star rating goes down and odds for 'good service' go up. For example, level 1 charisma/fitness and 40% chance at bad service. 2-3 is only 20%. Get to 7-8 and you are more likely to have neutral or good services and no bad service ratings. This should absolutely be rewarded, as waiters are also partially responsible for one of the most important metrics, wait time. If the food is ready and the waiter isn't on the ball, wait time suffers. It's also required of them to get the order in the first place! Here are the 5 pay grades for waiters, so you know what you'll be paying if you promote them:
Waiter Rank 1 - $2
Waiter Rank 2 - $5
Waiter Rank 3 - $9
Waiter Rank 4 - $16
Waiter Rank 5 - $25
Chefs
If your chef gets insulted, praise them to help their mood. An angry chef = a bad chef. They have knives, you know.
The Chef's role in your restaurant is to make food and drink. Don't let them get less interaction from you just because they're in the back. The chef's mood and skill play into their performance, just as any other. I believe that Sims can cook level 5 foods at level 5, but not do it well until they surpass the skill level. Each level will make it more likely they are going to produce better quality food. Differing from other positions, the chef can be told to cook either quickly or carefully. These two both provide +/- 20% quality and speed. Quickly will sacrifice quality by 20% but speed up by the same amount. It is good to choose quickly if you have a high level chef cooking low level foods and you want to feed lots of Sims and move them out fast. Carefully is good for newer chefs who have low skill but might make use of the quality bump. This is particularly useful when you first hire your second chef. These settings will stay active until you change them back to normally.
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I have get to work and dine out. You are able to hire (unemployed) sims you've made that are not in the household that you are playing in GTW. More than likely, its the same for Dine Out.
The only sims that are available for hiring are non-housed NPC's. You could play a sim, then evict them and delete a number of the Out of The World sims using the Manage Household menu until your previously played sim appears on the hiring menu. You could also replace that now hired sim in a house, but the minute you go to play that household the sim would lose his/her job.
I have tried. I've go two sisters - Allie and Rita. Rita hired Allie as a chef and Allie hired Rita as a waitress. Let me tell you, I've got two Allies and two Ritas. The restaurant owners Rita and Allie comes in to the restaurant, opens it and the staff arrives - including waitress Rita and chef Allie. The staff sisters appear as a new entry in the owners sisters' Relationships and apparently owner Rita doesn't like the waitress Rita much, but likes chef Allie. Owner Allie on the other hand likes waitress Rita but hasn't met chef Alline (which is weird, because she regularly pays for her training, praises her and eventually promotes her). Both owner sisters have the relationship bar maxed out with green (they're good sisters). This is so weird. ;_;
I just have a question wondering if u might know the answer. The employee u having in the restraint can u play as them to get there skills up and it help them at work? Like getting a chef more cooking skill and they still have it when u play in the restraint. I hope I make sense x
I used cheats to skill up some sims then placed them into my game but not in a house. I deleted all the other townies in the manage worlds menu then went into my played household and bought a restaurant. The only sims that appeared on the hiring menu were the skilled townies I had made so hiring them was easy. I then placed them all into houses but did not play them. That way I was able to have skilled NPC's in all the positions in my restaurant that wouldn't be culled.
You have to play the sims to skill them up but after you have placed them into a household just mark that household as 'unplayed'. Have a look at this tutorial that a simmer made on the USA official Sims forum. It's great. Tutorial
Yes, this happens sometimes. I've had the same thing occur a few times. Least the traits stick so the sims have the right traits for the job. I have found that when this happens the sims seem to skill up slightly quicker, not sure if this really is the case as I haven't tested it extensively but it appears that way.
I do not understand how to get this to work. My host and my waiter are doing what they're supposed to do, but my chef does nothing which leads to all my guests leaving. I can't even interact with him with the manage-thing that works fine with the other employees. Anyone know? Or am I just stupid?
Sounds like a bug. Fire him then save and quit your game. Delete the localthumb.package file from your TheSims4 folder and restart your game. Hire a new chef and hopefully it will be fixed.
In order for every employee to do their job the station that they work at has to be correctly placed in the restaurant or else they will just stand at the sidewalk. So move your chef station around until you figure out where it works.
I just hired my second chef, but now the first one doesn't show up for work, so all I have is the new, inexperienced chef. Does anyone know if this always happens, or should they both show up?
While you are on your restaurant lot go into build mode and using the 'show all' option and then sort by pack>Dine Out. That will then only show the items that came with the Dine Out pack and make it much easier to scroll through and find items. You can also use the search bar for quick searching items.
There are some listed already but they didn't work for me. It was actually fairly easy to rack up perk points after playing with my resturaunt open for 2 real time hours. Don't make it too big, and click the pay for training option under management for all employees everytime you open the resturaunt because training happens between employee shifts.
I built 6 restaurants, and I want my main family of tech gurus to own all of them. However, the game said that my Sim family does not own any restaurants --- even though I had them purchase 2 restaurants already. How do I fix that?
Are you able to sell any of the restaurants that you've bought? If you can I'd sell them then save and quit your game. Delete the localthumbcache.package file and restart your game. Purchase the restaurant lots again and see if it all works as it should. If you can't sell them, it might be best to bulldoze the lots, change the lot type to residential after bulldozing and save, quit and delete the localthumbcache.package file before going back into your game to try again. Once back in your game replace the restaurant lots from your library and try buying them again.If all else fails you can do a factory reset which should clear out and weird bugs that don't require a developers fix. Factory Reset
I can manage my employees at the first restaurant, even though the game says my Sims don't own any restaurants. However, I can't transfer funds to the restaurants or anything like that.
Do you mean your host isn't seating anyone? Check that the Hosts Station is clicked to grin in build mode and has not been placed using MOO or the alt key, also that it is not facing a wall. All these uses cause issues!
I actually have two questions.. are you able to make like say a family to run the restaurant could you have one family member run it and one be a waiter or chef or a host or do they just help run the restaurant? and second question can you own more than one restaurant? and can it be kinda like another location of the first one?
Question 1: No, unfortunately the game pack does not have this kind of game play. so all your active sims can do is be the manager/owner. Question 2: Yes, there is the ability to run more than one restaurant at a time and make basically a franchise line of your own restaurants.
As playalot said and replied to me, you can't hire playable sims (any played household or family won't show up on the hiring list) just the "Not in the world" or not active households, which must be Unemployed sims too. Don't know if playalot tried the eviction method. I haven't yet. You can't apply your sims for the job either (via the "Find the job" method).
Try placing your staff into houses using the manage household menu. Don't play them though as this forces them to quit their jobs. I think it is probably culling that is 'getting' your staff so placing them in a household should solve this issue.
Anybody had the customer that has a special symbol under the star rating, they review the restaurant? My waiters despite being well trained never serve this customer so she leaves a bad review every time when they appear, is this a bug or fault?
This is the Food Critic. Have your sim greet them and offer them a free meal or drink etc. Also prioritize their meal so that it is served faster than normal. The decoration of your restaurant all counts with the rating as well.
I downloaded the game from orgin and when playing sims 4 fine out my actions for my employees to make their life doesn't appear and action boxes are blank. However when customers come in the actions for the table are clear. Please help
Delete the localthumbcache.package file from your TheSims4 folder and then do a factory reset. Factory Reset This should fix the issue. If it doesn't we have a great forum section where you can ask for further help. Dine Out Discussions
Is there any way to gain the staff satisfaction ? I cant seems to gain more than neutral . And i know the scale goes very unsatisfied to very satisfied . And the waiter/waitress seems very lazy-looking even after i've maxed out the skill and promotion to level 5 . It kinda bugs me a bit
how often do we need to praise the staff? i cant seem to get past the neutral rating from my staff. thanks. i do check up on them and praise them and sometimes gives inspirational speech too. still in neutral :(
Hey, I have deleted the sims appearing on the hiring menu and made (non-played) sims just to be used for hiring and there's still no change in the options to hire. What do I need to do to the sims I made to make them appear on the hiring list?
While your game is paused take a look at the household management menu. From there you can view all the non-played 'Not In The World' sims. These will be the sims that will appear in the 'hire' menu. If you have many sims in this category this could be why you are not seeing the sims you specifically made. You can delete any unwanted sims here. Quit out of your game and delete the localthumbcache.package file and then try again. This time you should see your made sims in the hiring menu at your restaurant.
Thanks, it made a bit of a difference but I still see these sims that I have no idea where they are. Like I've deleted all my bold/broken sims and yet they are still the ones that appear. I also deleted the localcache. Did I need to keep the one that has disabled in the name? (I deleted both but kept a backup in case.)
I'm not sure exactly what you mean but you could delete every single sim from the Not In World menu and the game will just generate more once you are back in live mode.
Just bought a restaurant, had an okay first opening. Closed the restaurant and opened up the next and my one and only waiter didn't show up. What do I do?!
Using Household management menu check to see if the waiter sim is still actually in your game. The waiter might have been culled. If the waiter is still present delete him from that menu and hire a new one. If the sim was culled, hire a new waiter and place him/her into a house, again through the household management menu, but do not play the sim as this will cause the sim to lose their job.
Does anyone else seem to be getting a very strange glitch where the customers just won't stay seated? I mean its one thing to keep getting up to go use the restroom or something but is actually is so bad that once the food gets their if it was real life it would be cold by the time they actually finished their conversations to understand "hey look food!" The odd thing is, it was working fine until I actually bought the thing making sims eat faster.
Simmers seem to be having issues after buying that particular perk. There doesn't seem to be any work-arounds just yet so you may have to sell all your restaurants and try again, this time without purchasing the 'Fast Eaters' perk. Have a read through the Bug Reports thread, you might find some tips there at least. The Sims 4 Bug Reports
This is really an on-going issue/bug. Fire the 'missing' waiter and delete him from the Not In World menu through Household Management. Then hire a new one.
Has anyone experienced customers who are initially seated, get their meal, and then stand up doing nothing for ages? I keep getting this, and it's very annoying, as you can't force them to eat, and it takes the whole day to get them to finish their meal and pay!
Yes, it seems related to conversations they get into while waiting to be seated. Nothing can really be done to fix this apart from either just closing the restaurant if most other diners have paid or just ignore the standing sim! I did try giving the 'walking around sim' a free drink but all she did was pick up her drink, walk to the kitchen, place the drink down and then stood there for ages. *face palm*
I have an issue with a restaurant I built. I have a host station and the host shows up and talks on the phone, but does not seat anyone - ever. It is sitting in the middle of an open area not facing a wall. I have deleted the host station and purchased a new one and restarted the game- same issue. I have fired the host and hired a new one - same issue. I have also tried coming to the restaurant as a customer and click on the host station to request a table and my sims never get seated. I hate to bulldoze the whole thing but I'm not sure what else to do. If anyone has any advice or has had a similar problem I would love to hear how you resolved this issue. Thank you!
This 'host bug' is problematic for quite a few simmers. Adding a 'me too' or a post about your issues here in detail will help the devs to fix it sooner. EA The Sims 4 Bug Reports I would suggest selling the restaurant in build mode (that way you keep your perk points) and replacing it from your library. This may just solve it for you. We also have a discussion thread about this on the forum but there just doesn't seem to be a reliable fix just yet. Forum Thread
So one of my employees gets angry a lot. I've made sure to praise her, get her trained, and to promote her when she's earned it. However she just insulted my sim (her boss) to her face!! Does anyone know what I should do? I think I'm going to demote her or fire her because she just trashes my restaurant at times and gets angry even when I'm taking care of her. She seems to need a lot more attention than my other employees, who usually remain neutral.
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Comments (42)
Let me tell you, I've got two Allies and two Ritas. The restaurant owners Rita and Allie comes in to the restaurant, opens it and the staff arrives - including waitress Rita and chef Allie.
The staff sisters appear as a new entry in the owners sisters' Relationships and apparently owner Rita doesn't like the waitress Rita much, but likes chef Allie. Owner Allie on the other hand likes waitress Rita but hasn't met chef Alline (which is weird, because she regularly pays for her training, praises her and eventually promotes her).
Both owner sisters have the relationship bar maxed out with green (they're good sisters).
This is so weird. ;_;
Has anyone tried to hire playable sims?
Have a look at this tutorial that a simmer made on the USA official Sims forum. It's great.
Tutorial
Factory Reset
Question 2: Yes, there is the ability to run more than one restaurant at a time and make basically a franchise line of your own restaurants.
Don't know if playalot tried the eviction method. I haven't yet.
You can't apply your sims for the job either (via the "Find the job" method).
Factory Reset
This should fix the issue. If it doesn't we have a great forum section where you can ask for further help.
Dine Out Discussions
Quit out of your game and delete the localthumbcache.package file and then try again. This time you should see your made sims in the hiring menu at your restaurant.
If the sim was culled, hire a new waiter and place him/her into a house, again through the household management menu, but do not play the sim as this will cause the sim to lose their job.
The Sims 4 Bug Reports
EA The Sims 4 Bug Reports
I would suggest selling the restaurant in build mode (that way you keep your perk points) and replacing it from your library. This may just solve it for you.
We also have a discussion thread about this on the forum but there just doesn't seem to be a reliable fix just yet.
Forum Thread