Sims 4 Buying a Restaurant: How to Buy and What are Some Top Options in the Gallery

The Sims 4 restaurant business options come with the Dine Out expansion pack. The pack allows you to buy or build a restaurant from scratch. If you are a food and business enthusiast just like me, check out this post, which will lead you through all the ins and outs of buying and running a restaurant! 🍝

Sims 4 Dine Out Expansion Pack Explained

Sims 4 buying a restaurant option is available in the Dine Out pack.

The Sims 4 Dine Out was released on June 7, 2016, and is a relatively old expansion pack. The previous Sims games also have dining-out-related packs such as The Sims 2 Nightlife and The Sims 2 Open for Business.

From this standpoint, owning and dining out at restaurants in the game has been a Sims game tradition and classic content. After all, who would say no to having an additional business-running simulator game incorporated into The Sims game? 😍

The Sims 4 Dine Out opens up a variety of options for the base game:

1. players can place restaurants designed by other players in the Gallery
2. players can own and run restaurants through the Buy a Business option
3. players can dine out with other NPCs at fancy restaurants in the worlds

Price and Ratings:

The price for the Dine Out pack is around $19.99 in the USA, and you can always wait for the discount during the big summer sale, Black Friday, or Christmas. The pack can guarantee about 8-9 hours of gameplay for you to explore all the features of it. After that, you’ll be very familiar with how to run a restaurant in the game.

Steam rating for this pack is Mostly Negative out of 136 reviews. Some negative aspects of this pack are:

1. families can’t participate in running the restaurants and the business can’t be passed to other members
2. your Sim can’t do the staff’s job like seating the guests
3. bugs related to the proper running of this pack

As far as speaking from my gameplay experience, I would recommend this pack as I haven’t encountered any intolerable bug issues yet. So far, it’s only that my guests are turning nude and the restaurant revenue is pretty bad when my Sim is not there.

There’s also not much variety between each phase of the restaurant development and the pack loses its charm on me after 9 hours of gameplay. 🫠

Related: Should I buy Dine Out or not? Read this first!

Sims 4 Buying a Restaurant, How to Do That?

About Sims 4 buying a restaurant, you can either purchase an existing restaurant in the game or purchase one available land to build your own restaurant.

Place Restaurants in Your Worlds from the Gallery

The process of placing restaurants in your world is:

Go to Manage Worlds -> click Open the Gallery in the upper right corner -> choose Lots and Lot Type (Restaurant) on the left filter -> untick all the packs you don’t own on the left filter -> choose any restaurant you like on the right side and place them into the empty lands of your worlds

After that, in Sims 4, buying a restaurant is available for your Sim to get an existing restaurant.

Buy an Available Land and Build Your Restaurant from Scratch

You can also go to the play mode and use your Sim to purchase land for business:

Open your Sim’s phone and click Business / Click the Owned Business button at the lower right corner -> select Buy a Restaurant -> choose any existing restaurant or empty land to purchase

If you purchase an empty land, remember you need to have at least $5,000 for the furnishing before your restaurant can be open for business. The must-have items include:

1. a toilet: $250
2. a sink: $120
3. 4 dining spots: minimum 2 tables ($225*2) and 4 chairs ($115*4)
4. a chef station: $3,300
5. a waiter station: $125
6. a host station: $100

Top 10 Restaurant Lots from the Gallery

You might not have enough time and energy to design and build a restaurant from the very beginning. In that case, buying a restaurant from the Gallery would be the best for you!

Now, let’s have a look at what our top options are in the Gallery! The selection will cover as many styles and design types as possible. All the restaurants are available and can be searched out in your Gallery.

Nuances do Amor

Wow! That’s gonna be your first reaction upon glancing at this restaurant design. Nuances do Amor means the nuances of love in English, and this restaurant design is the very manifestation of it. 🫦

The exterior looks like a French palace with a greenhouse design. The restaurant inside has light pinkish furnishing, making the dining experience even more dreamy and romantic. If you don’t have a French-style restaurant yet in your world, you should definitely have one!

Le Sommet: French Cuisine

Le Sommet, which can be translated as the top, is a delicate French-style street restaurant. As it stands there, it reminds you of the leisure moment of strolling down the cobbled street and being attracted by the coffee brewing scent. Its night view will remind you of Van Gogh’s painting of Cafe Terrace.

The casualness and fashionable front design will definitely add more styles and colors to your Sims 4 gameplay.

Shimuzu 2.0

Shimuzu, possibly a misspelling, originally means pure water in Japanese and should be spelled as Shimizu (清水). The restaurant design fully captures the connotations of this name. It combines the water tank and blue color with a modern house shape and dark red tone, giving the whole structure a minimalist and modern style.

Your Sims can order many seafood dishes here, and enjoy the fish tank views in this restaurant! 🐠

SUBWAY-EAT FRESH!

This restaurant gives you the more-than-real-life experience of dining at a Subway in The Sims 4. The complex outer building structure and the colorful ads infuse the building with some hustle-bustle vibe. The parking lot also renders the restaurant more realistic and makes you feel how welcome the restaurant is.

You can certainly go for this restaurant simply because of its outer design and sandwich menu.🥪

Restaurant Base Game

This restaurant has the vibe of a modern cafe, and its brown and brick design makes it all the more chic. Inside is also in compliance with the general modern brown cafe style. The floor is paved with gray and brown bricks. The whole place is properly decorated with greenery as well.

Compared to other restaurants, this restaurant looks more like a place for a drink, some light meals, and doing some office work at the same time. It’s the kind of cafe you would want to go and grab a coffee every morning!☕

Cory’s Place

Cory’s Place is a perfect blend of plants and greenery and a complex house structure. The overall glass wall design gives your Sims the experience of as if dining in the greenhouse. And trust me, the greenery layout in the restaurant will not fail your expectation of having a meal in the botanical garden.

By adding this restaurant to your world, you’re inviting more nature into your gameplay!🌺

McDonald’s Super

This McDonald’s Super design was only published on 09/02/2025. Its realistic design of the restaurant and the front parking lot will definitely remind you of the real-world McDonald’s!

This lot is relatively bigger and more expensive but you can still place it into your world and have some McDonald’s dine-outs from time to time with your dating partners or teenager friends!

Bob’s Burger Bar

There are many different Bob’s Burger restaurant designs in the Gallery and this franchise restaurant is also one of the most searched-for options for The Sims 4 players on Google. It’s a simple fast-food and street-food restaurant design, like some small snack bars you would expect at the street corner near your house.

jenniger’s Bob’s Burger Bar only requires the base game, which means you don’t need other expansion packs other than Dine Out to have the full content of this restaurant. It’s also small in size so you can fully utilize some small-size lands in your game. There are also some other Bob’s restaurants such as Bob’s Pancakes available in the Gallery!

Papa’s Pizerria

Not a real-world restaurant, but what a happy surprise! If you love playing Papa’s series of games, you might want to place this restaurant into your world. The cozy style matches so well with the overall tone of Papa’s Pizzeria game, a street corner shop that gives you the warmth and coziness of home.

Restaurant Street Market

After going through so many fast food restaurants and grand restaurants, let’s have a look at this street market design. The artist makes full use of the restaurant furnishing requirements and turns the two chef stations into two food stalls instead. The size of this restaurant is also perfect for you to make use of the smaller lands in the world.

It’s a perfect reminder of the food stalls and markets of the big city nightlife.🌃

FAQs

Can you buy a restaurant in Sims 4?

Yes, you can definitely buy a restaurant and run a restaurant in Sims 4! To do that, you need to purchase the Dine Out expansion pack and that will unlock the options of placing restaurants in your worlds or buying a restaurant in the business options.

Is owning a restaurant worth it in Sims 4?

Owning a restaurant is totally worth it in The Sims 4. As you just get started with your business, as long as you can keep the guests giving you three-star reviews and more, your revenues will be increasing steadily. After you reach four-star reviews, you can easily earn $1000+ from opening 8 hours with a 150% mark-up.

What pack do you need to own a restaurant in Sims 4?

You need to own the Dine Out pack to own and run a restaurant in The Sims 4. The price for this pack is $19.99 with a 30% discount sometimes. The price to value is better when there is a discount because the pack can guarantee about 8-10 hours of freshness in gameplay before you are familiar with the whole gameplay.

How to purchase an owned business in Sims 4?

You can either click your Sim’s phone and go to the Business menu to buy a business or click on the Owned Business at the lower right corner to buy a business.

How to put a restaurant in Sims 4?

To put a restaurant into your worlds, you need to save your game and go to Manage World in the upper right corner of your UI. Click the gallery in Manage World -> select the lot type (restaurant) -> select Dine Out expansion pack only ->choose any restaurant designed by other players on the right -> place the lot into your world. 👌

Conclusion: Sims 4 Buying a Restaurant

In Sims 4, buying a restaurant can add so much more fun to the base game. The Sims 4 Dine Out expansion pack enriches the base game with the options of placing more customized restaurants in the worlds, running your own restaurants, and dining out in the game.

Buying an existing restaurant can be expensive, depending on which customized restaurant you are going for. However, if you want to buy available land only and design your own restaurant, you can gradually build on the land with more and more revenues earned through the restaurant. It would take a while for your restaurant to be fully furnished, but who knows, it can be more fun too!