Nivalis Nights Restaurant Guide: Opening Hours, Staffing, Menu, and Layout Tips

Running a successful restaurant in Nivalis Nights takes some tricks. Beginners may find it rather difficult to earn even hundreds of revenue from Ramen Noir or other restaurants. There are several things that the player needs to deal with, and to be honest, more restaurants usually mean more revenue. So, how to open more restaurants and make each and every one of them profitable? This guide covers the essential restaurant management systems in Nivalis Nights, including staffing, menu selection, equipment, layout optimisation, and other tricks and hacks that may come in handy.

Understand Nivalis Nights Restaurant Opening Hours

In Nivalis Nights, a restaurant’s opening hours depend on the working schedules of its cooks and waiters. These employees determine when the restaurant can operate.

The player can adjust the work hours, pay, tasks, and other metrics directly in the main menu. There is no need to go to the staff hiring board or the restaurant info panel to adjust them.

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Prepare for Restaurant Rush Hours

Customers do not necessarily enter restaurants at a steady rate throughout the day. Instead, they often arrive in waves around three main periods:

• 08:30: Morning rush
• 13:00: Lunchtime rush
• 18:00: Evening rush

These periods can bring a sudden increase in orders, making it harder for a small team to keep up. The player can help employees during these busy periods by taking orders, serving dishes, and cooking.

However, rush hours can differ between locations. For example, Ramen Noir and Azure Breeze experience more noticeable customer waves, while Yummy Canteen does not appear to have the same level of concentrated demand.

Observe the number of customers entering each business and identify when the workload becomes difficult for employees to manage. Between restaurant levels 1 – 3 is the best time for the player to observe the rush hours and identify existing problems with the current restaurant. The player can make use of this timeframe to adjust the staff, kitchen, and dining layouts.

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How Many Employees Does a Restaurant Need?

Cooks and Waiters

As a general guideline, one cook and one or two waiters can handle a restaurant with approximately 10 seats. This provides a reasonable starting point, although the ideal number depends on customer traffic and the restaurant’s layout.

Cooks and waiters have different workloads. Cooks generally have a more focused job. They prepare dishes and drinks according to incoming orders, so their workload mainly depends on the menu. They perform all the tasks in the kitchen area. Waiters, on the other hand, have several responsibilities. They need to move between customers and the kitchen, take orders, deliver food, and handle dirty dishes. Their workload can become particularly demanding when customers arrive in large waves.

For this reason, adding another waiter may improve service more than hiring an additional cook, especially when the kitchen already prepares orders quickly.

Should the Restaurant Hire a Cleaner?

A cleaner can help keep the restaurant tidy by removing rubbish on the floor. However, the player does not necessarily need to employ one for an entire working day.

One practical approach is to schedule the cleaner for only a couple of hours a day. This gives the employee time to clear accumulated rubbish without occupying a full shift.

Alternatively, the player can handle cleaning personally. This can be a useful way to reduce staffing costs, particularly when the restaurant does not generate enough income to justify another employee.

Give Every Employee One Main Responsibility

One important staffing principle is to avoid assigning unrelated jobs to the same employee. For example, asking a cook to handle cleaning duties may seem like a convenient way to save money. However, the cook will also spend time completing lower-priority tasks instead of preparing orders. A more efficient arrangement gives each employee one main responsibility, so the cooks can stay in the kitchen area, and the waiters can focus on taking orders.

Generally speaking, the candidates on the hiring board also demand less pay if they can only perform one role. As the player spends more time playing and levels up the business skill, the player can lower their pay in the future while still keeping the staff happy.

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Choose the Right Restaurant Menu

A larger menu does not automatically produce more income. In fact, offering too many dishes can make ingredient management unnecessarily complicated.

For most restaurants, one drink and one food item are enough to create a functional menu. This allows customers to order a drink and a dish during the same visit, giving the restaurant two opportunities to generate income without requiring a long list of recipes.

The player should focus on selecting dishes that match local customer preferences. Different districts have different food preferences, so pay attention to the tags associated with the dishes and the preferences of people living in the surrounding area.

A suitable menu should achieve two goals: maximise selling prices while keeping customers Happy.

Balance Selling Prices and Customer Happiness

Setting higher prices can increase the amount earned from every order. The player can max out the selling price as long as the customers are still “Happy” with the menu. The attitude drops decrease the number of customers visiting the restaurant.

The player can also consider substituting current dishes with dishes with a higher selling price. Generally speaking, dishes with higher exclusivity have a higher selling price cap.

As the restaurant levels up, the player can increase the maximum selling price of its dishes. This provides an opportunity to improve profitability over time.

Choose Dishes That Share Ingredients

Whenever possible, select dishes that use the same ingredients. This reduces the number of different resources the player needs to produce or purchase.

It is particularly useful to choose recipes that share ingredients that can be grown in the greenhouse. The player can then maintain a smaller selection of crops while supplying several menu items.

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Provide Enough Equipment for Every Cook

Having the correct equipment is essential for maintaining kitchen productivity. Each dish and drink requires specific preparation equipment, and cooks cannot work efficiently if they need to wait for each other to finish using a machine.

The player should provide each cook with a complete set of equipment required by the restaurant’s menu. For example, suppose the menu contains recipes that require a blender, drinking machine, and food processor. If the restaurant employs two cooks, it should ideally have two blenders, two drinking machines, and two food processors.

Without enough machines, the player may notice that there is one cook working while others are just standing in the kitchen.

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Design an Efficient Restaurant Layout

Restaurant layout has a direct impact on how quickly employees complete their tasks. The player should prioritise two things when designing the interior: keeping related equipment together and reducing the distance between the kitchen and customers.

1. Keep Related Kitchen Equipment Together: Arrange equipment according to the dishes and drinks on the menu. For example, a Bacon Bloody Mary requires a blender and a drinking machine. Keeping these two machines close together allows the cook to move between them more easily. The distance between the food processor and the sink also affects the waiters’ speed in cleaning up and serving.
2. Keep the Kitchen Close to the Seating Area: Waiters must repeatedly travel between the kitchen and seating area to deliver orders and collect dirty dishes. One useful approach is to prioritize new restaurants that have bars, which can accommodate both equipment and customer service, or at least are close to the kitchen. This allows the player to combine the kitchen and serving area in a relatively compact space. Honeycomb and Toshigami are examples of this kind of layout.
3. Reverse Kitchen Counters: The player can also reverse the arrangement of kitchen counters and move furniture around to shorten the routes employees need to take.

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How to Open New Restaurants in Nivalis Nights

Opening another restaurant requires more preparation than simply finding an empty venue. The player needs to obtain the appropriate business permit, secure a location, pay rent, purchase equipment and furniture, and hire the necessary employees.

The “Business Empire” quest from Agent Teleshko is an important starting point for obtaining permits and learning how to expand the business. Other character quests can also provide permits, including the “Lost at Sea” quest, which rewards the player with a Tier 2 Business Permit.

Before opening another location, consider improving the existing restaurants first. Getting them to level 3 and hiring managers can make it easier to maintain their operations while the player focuses on a new business.

For a complete walkthrough covering permits, rental requirements, staffing, equipment, and location selection, see our guide: Nivalis Nights: How to Open New Restaurants – Permits, Staff, and Best Locations

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If the Restaurants Are Still Running Low on Profit…

It is worthwhile to spend a day observing how the restaurant is running if the restaurant keeps running low on profit. There are mainly two ways to find out what is going on with the problematic restaurants: one is to check the financial report, and the other is to physically get there and observe how the restaurant operates.

The player may notice several common problems that make a restaurant unprofitable:

1. Staff costs are too high. Early restaurants such as Ramen Noir usually have very high staff costs due to staff having high-level skills. Consider increasing the dish selling prices and the number of seats.
2. Inefficient work layout. Many customers are unhappy or leave without being served.
3. Some restaurants are just quieter than the rest. Yummy Canteen usually has fewer customers compared to Toshigami.

🌃 If you’re looking for help navigating Nivalis, discovering hidden locations, completing quests, managing restaurants, or uncovering the city’s secrets, our Nivalis Nights Guide Hub is your home for quest walkthroughs, exploration guides, restaurant tips, and much more. We add new guides regularly, so check back as you explore everything Nivalis has to offer!