Kebab Chefs! 1.0 Review: Undercooked But Still Tasty
Running a virtual kitchen is stressful enough without your dirty dishes vanishing into another dimension.
Kebab Chefs! recently hit its 1.0 release, promising a fully realized restaurant management experience where you can team up with three friends to chop, fry, and serve your way to culinary dominance. The core loop hits all the right notes for a management sim. You start small, unlocking new equipment and dishes by defeating rival chefs in cooking battles. The progression feels rewarding and the sheer variety of food keeps the daily grind interesting. While the new UI and visual upgrades look great, the launch version still carries a massive amount of technical baggage from its Early Access days.
The Daily Grind
You have total control over your restaurant, from designing the floor plan to setting the daily menu.
The cooking mechanics require actual focus. You don’t just click a single button to spawn a meal. You have to slice potatoes twice before frying them, manage the heat, and build dishes component by component. Making a simple chicken soup requires you to manually add water, broth, lemon, and chopped chicken into a pot. Serving customers is a completely different beast. You are limited to four servings per station, which creates a frantic bottleneck during the lunch rush.
Before you lose your mind trying to plate food while taking orders, know that you can eventually hire staff to handle the front of house. You just have to survive the first few milestones completely alone, constantly running back and forth to wash dishes, take money, and empty the recycling bin. If you want a more relaxed experience, the developers did add a dedicated easy mode to take off some of the pressure.
The Microwave Meta
If you fall behind during a massive dinner rush, you might be tempted to cut corners. You can prep dishes the night before, store them in the freezer, and just nuke them in the microwave when a customer gets impatient (Gotta love Chef Mike). Doing this slaps a penalty on your restaurant rating, but sometimes it is the only way to get the angry mob out of your lobby.
After hours, you can even blow off some steam by playing blackjack or hitting the drums in the local bar. Just beware that the gambling rules are fundamentally broken right now. I watched aces and kings randomly trigger a bust, completely ignoring standard blackjack logic.
Decorating in the Dark
Designing your dining room is where the customization shines, assuming the game actually lets you place your furniture.
The snapping tool in build mode is wildly inconsistent. I spent way too much time fighting the camera just to get a corner counter to line up, only for the adjacent pieces to refuse to snap into place. Minor decorative items are heavily glitched too. Small televisions sink into the wrong shelf of their display stands, and torn pieces of parsley clip deep into the countertops, making them impossible to pick up.
Co-op Chaos and Desync
A full 1.0 release carries a certain level of expectation, and sadly, the multiplayer experience trips over its own shoelaces.
Before you invite friends into a co-op session, prepare yourself for massive desync issues. I watched ingredients clip through plates, pots lose their interaction icons completely, and dirty dish trays vanish into the void. If you squeeze mayonnaise or ketchup onto a plate of fries, the blob might just teleport and float in the air.
If you move a dining table around, your friends might only see the old layout, creating invisible walls that block their pathways. In larger restaurant locations, a bug will occasionally cause customers to walk ten times their normal speed, making it physically impossible to keep up. The core game underneath all this is genuinely a great time, but dealing with these constant technical hiccups drains your momentum.
The Verdict
Kebab Chefs! has a fantastic foundation. Managing the kitchen, unlocking new recipes, and panic-microwaving a frozen meal to save a rating is a blast with friends. But a 1.0 release should not be this fundamentally broken in multiplayer. At its full price of $17.99, the bugs are a bit too hard to swallow. If you can grab it on sale for under ten bucks, it is absolutely worth throwing on an apron and enduring the jank. I have hope the developers will patch these issues, but for now, proceed with caution.
Score: 6.5/10 A deliciously fun management sim that needs a bit more time in the oven.
We at NLM received a key for this game for free, this however didn't impact our review in any way.
