Cat Garden: Food Party Tycoon Guide: Tips, Tricks & Strategies to Build the Purr-fect Restaurant

Save the world? Defeat the demon king? Grind to the top 100 in the ladder? Meta crushing your dreams and team? Sometimes it just gets so tiring. Sometimes you just want to sit back and relax with a cozy game. And what better way to do that than with a bunch of cats eating sushi?

Cat Garden – Food Party Tycoon (which I’ll just refer to as Cat Garden) is an idle business sim very similar to games like Office Cat and Lumbercat, though this one’s made by a different developer. In Cat Garden, you’ll set up restaurants, food trucks, and kiosks to cater to a variety of cute cats and not-quite-cats. Cat Garden is available on both the Google Play Store and the App Store.

While Cat Garden does have a tutorial, it’s very broad, fast, and doesn’t dwell on the finer points of managing each aspect of your food business – hence, this beginner’s guide, to give you a clearer understanding of what your goals are, what each cat and facility can do for you, and how to build a better business from the ground up. Do note that as an idle sim, Cat Garden can be played perfectly fine without a guide, but if you’re looking for assistance or improvement points in your business, read on!

In this Cat Garden guide, we’ll be covering the following topics:

• Business Basics – goals, currency, basic controls, and so on.
• Better Service – upgrading the various aspects of your enterprise (and coincidentally, making you more money)
• Freebies – where to get the various freebies in Cat Garden.

Lastly, if you’re looking for a quick skim, feel free to jump to the “Quick Tips” subsections!

Business Basics

First, let’s go over the basics of your business, namely your goals, the basic service loop, currencies, and reputation.

Quick Tips:

• Your main goal is to grow your restaurant. You do this by reaching certain milestones – most importantly attaining reputation levels.
• The basic business loop is: the customer comes in, the customer places an order, a server takes the order, a chef makes the order, the customer eats, the customer optionally leaves tip then leaves. You can collect the tips for a little extra cash.
• There are four currencies in the game: gold is used to upgrade a lot of things, Gems are premium currency, catnip is for decorations, and Recipe Research is for refining your recipes.
• The cat head currency is reputation. There are two main ways to increase this: every 100 levels on a kitchen or table grants one point, and decoration items each give some reputation levels.

Your Goals

Let’s start by discussing the objective of the game. As with most tycoon-type games, it’s pretty simple: set up shop, provide good business, grow your reputation, expand, and do it all over again.

Once you’ve reached a high enough reputation, your business will expand. This will unlock more of the play area for you, allowing you to set up new kitchens, tables, and facilities – which in turn will net you more money to grow your business!

The Business Loop

Business begins once a customer enters. They’ll find a seat and place an order, indicated by the clipboard above their heads. A server will come and take their order. Magically, your chefs will know what the order is (no callbacks, how convenient!), so they’ll prepare the food and leave it to a server to pick up. Once it’s done, a free server will swing by to pick up the order and bring it to the customer. Once they get the food, they’ll eat it, pay for the meal, and sometimes leave a tip. The tip isn’t much, but every bit helps.

By studying the business loop and breaking it down into its individual steps, we can see where we can improve:

• If everyone was faster, customers wouldn’t have to wait so much.
• If customers tipped more, you’d make more money.
• If the quality of your food is better, your customers will pay more.

We’ll discuss these further in the next section.

Currencies

Cat Garden has four different currencies to keep track of, which you can see in the upper panel. The first one – the cat head – is reputation, and we’ll talk about that one in a little bit.

The currencies are:

• Gold – the yellow coin. Used to pay for a lot of things. Earned by serving customers, mostly.
• Gems – the blue diamond. Premium currency that’s used for premium boosts, items in the shop, rolling in the gacha, and more. Can be earned in-game.
• Recipe Research – the sushi. Used exclusively to upgrade your recipes. Earned by serving customers.
• Catnip – the green leaf. Used exclusively to buy decorations. Earned via quests and daily quests.

Reputation Level

The main obstacle to growing your business is your reputation level.

There are two main ways to raise your reputation level:

• Upgrade your kitchens (stands, where you produce food) and tables. Every 100 levels will give you one reputation level.
• Buy decorations.

We’ll discuss upgrades and decorations in a little bit.

Better Service

“If you build it, they will come” is a maxim I strongly believe in when it comes to attracting customers. By upgrading your business and providing better service to your customers, you’ll not only continue raking in more cash but also find new patrons and avenues for growth. Here’s how to ramp up your cat café.

Quick Tips:

• Hire more employees whenever available. Not only do they have passive boosts that can net extra money, but having more workers also means less traffic and faster customer turnaround time.
• Note that employees can work on any station, not just the one they have a passive boost for.
• You can hire multiple chefs and servers for one food, so long as you meet the reputation requirement.
• Upgrading your facilities results in more profit. Upgraded tables yield more research point income, while upgraded kitchens boost the selling price of food.
• Kitchens also gain another tile every 100 levels. More kitchen tiles mean more chefs can work simultaneously, increasing the speed of your restaurant.
• If you’re grinding reputation, upgrading kitchens is cheaper than upgrading tables.
• Decoration provides passive boosts to your restaurant. Decorations must be bought with catnip, which is a separate resource that you mostly earn from daily quests.
• There are multiple types and sizes of decoration, with more expensive ones generally offering better boosts. Be sure to scroll down in each decoration panel.
• You don’t need to install a decoration to receive its passive bonus and reputation. Merely owning it is enough.
• You can buy multiples of some decorations. Each of them will provide their bonus; if you can buy 10 decorations that give 1 reputation and 1% increased revenue, you’ll get 10 reputation and 10% revenue if you have 10.
• Decorations are a fantastic way to rapidly increase your reputation.
• You need to unlock more customers for your restaurant. Each customer can only exist once within the restaurant (meaning, for example, there can only be one pig inside the restaurant) so by unlocking more customers, you can make money faster. Unlocking customers costs gold and requires a minimum reputation level.
• You can unlock customers even if you don’t have seating for them.
• You can spend gold to train chefs, servers, and customers. Note that the boosts from each level are very low, but they do add up.
• The biggest boon that training has to offer is speed – faster movement, faster cooking time, and faster eating.
• Recipe research grants percent-based buffs to the selling price of your dishes. While expensive, this adds up quickly.
• Recipe research is done by spending Recipe Research points, which you earn from tables. The higher the level of your tables, the more points you’ll earn.
• Cat Garden has a tech tree in the Fish Lab. The Fish Lab features various nodes that can be researched to provide various buffs.
• All prerequisite nodes must be completed before moving on to a next-tier research project.
• Fish Lab research requires you to play the fishing minigame to earn points. Each attempt here consumes bait; you can hold 10 bait at once and regenerate them at one bait per 16 minutes.
• Gems can be spent to buy passive boosts. This isn’t a bad way to spend them as these boosts persist for as long as you play.
• If you tend to go AFK, it’s a good idea to put a few points into “offline income limit is extended”.
• Make use of blessings (upper left of the screen) as they provide good productivity buffs. All you need to do to trigger them is watch an ad.
• Blessings grow in potency as you use them. Each ad you watch also contributes to the VIP bar, which gives a passive revenue buff.
• Your head chef (the orange cat) is special in that they can both cook and serve. Their upgrades are tied to headgear, equipment, and fursonas, which mostly come from the gacha.
• Equipment drops in fragments, meaning you need to pull an item several items before actually getting it.
• Head chef equipment, like decorations, provides a bonus even when not equipped – just owning them is enough.

Hiring More Employees

The first and perhaps most important thing we can do to help our restaurant empire thrive is to improve the base business loop. Luckily, there are multiple things we can do to speed up service – the first of which is simply hiring more crew. More crew means less traffic and faster customer turnaround time, leading to more profit.

There are two types of employees: servers and chefs. Servers are responsible for delivering food, while chefs cook food. There’s one server and chef for each food type, but note that they’re not restricted to that type – for example, if you only have a Tempura Chef Cat but have a Sushi Cart, the chef will take over both stations. However, this is far from ideal as each employee has a passive bonus that applies to their food. Servers have a higher chance to get tips from their food while chefs have a higher chance of making perfect dishes, which sell for more.

You can recruit multiple cats for each dish type (four chefs and six servers), which will further streamline your production pipeline and make it more likely to trigger the passive bonus. Note that you need to reach certain reputation levels before you can hire more copies of a specific cat.

Upgrading Facilities

Another easy way to make our restaurant run better is to simply upgrade our tables and kitchens. To do this, tap on a facility and pay the required gold. The higher the level of the facility, the more expensive it is to upgrade.

Each facility provides different benefits as it’s upgraded:

• Tables generate more passive research points depending on their level.
• Kitchens improve the selling price of food per level. Every 100 levels also lets you expand the kitchen by one tile, allowing another chef to work on the station.

If you’re gunning for reputation, it’s far cheaper to upgrade kitchens than tables.

Decorations

Next up is décor – who wants to sit in a crappy, grimy restaurant in the middle of nowhere, after all? By setting up decorations around your restaurant, you’ll be giving your guests a better dining experience. Coincidentally, this also means more profit for you.

Decorations come in multiple categories – small, medium, large, special, and event decorations. Each decoration provides not only a passive boost (which can range from something as simple as more income on sold dishes to faster action time for chefs, servers, and customers) but also a very respectable reputation boost. In general, the more expensive a decoration is, the better the passive bonus.

While powerful, you can’t just spam decorations as they’re bought with catnip – the green leaf in your currency bar. Catnip is earned mostly via daily quests, though as a new player, you can get quite a bit of it from progression quests and achievements.

Now the important part: the decoration boost effect. First off, you don’t actually need to install decorations to get their passive bonus and reputation boost – just having them in your inventory is enough. This also means you don’t need to sacrifice your restaurant’s aesthetics just to maximize profits. On a side note, you can tap decorations if you’d like to move them around.

Next, you can buy multiple copies of some decorations, which you can see here:

Each of these copies grants you both the passive bonus and reputation boost.

Lastly, decorations are a fantastic way to blitz through early reputation ranks as each of them provides at least one level!

Unlocking Customers

For some reason, you need to pay money to get different types of customers. Think of it as investing in the right kind of advertising.

Unlocking more customers is important because only one of each customer type can be in the restaurant at once. This means that there won’t be more than one pig, one sheep, one beaver (or beaver cat?), or one giant cat at once. By catering to more types of customers at once, your restaurant becomes more active and generates more income.

Do keep in mind that you can still unlock more customers even if you don’t have the seating capacity for them. Ideally though, you’ll want as many customers as you have seats.

Training

You can invest gold into training your chefs, servers, and customers (for some reason).

Each of these cat types has different upgrades to choose from:

• Chef: faster cooking, faster movement, higher perfect dish chance.
• Server: faster movement, higher tip chance.
• Customer: faster movement, faster eating, bigger tips.

Note that each upgrade level here only grants a very tiny bonus (apart from tips, though it’s still small) so be prepared to invest a lot. In particular, training grants easy access to speed buffs, so I’d suggest starting on those – faster cats mean faster turnaround.

Recipe Upgrades

As customers eat at your tables, they’ll generate Recipe Research, presumably from their feedback. Recipe Research can be used to refine your recipes, which in turn grants increased profit from that dish.

Note that research costs are expensive off the bat and get even pricier the higher the research level. However, recipe upgrades grant a percent-based buff to that food item’s selling price, making these boosts extremely potent.

Fish Lab

You can visit the Fish Lab to conduct research that improves several aspects of your restaurant. To enter the Fish Lab, tap on the fishing cat slightly below your Salmon Sushi station.

At the Fish Lab, you can spend fish to start research. There’s a pretty large tech tree here, but do note that you must fully research prerequisite nodes before moving on to another research topic. Because of the long research timers (yes, even if you watch ads), I strongly urge you to keep an eye on your fish lab and always be researching something!

To pay for research, you’ll need to catch fish, which you can do via the fishing minigame.

In the fishing minigame, you’ll need to move your hook left and right as it rises to catch fish. Any fish that your hook touches will count as caught, and once your hook has 10 fish or you run out of time, the game ends. Each fish grants a different amount of fish points for research, with rarer and bigger fish yielding more points. Thus, strive to catch the best fish you can by wiggling!

Fishing minigame attempts are capped by bait. You can have up to 10 bait at once, and by default, it takes 16 minutes to generate one bait. Be sure to spend your bait and always be researching something.

Premium Boosts

You can spend Gems to buy permanent passive boosts. This is a good way to spend your Gems as these passives stay with you all throughout your Cat Garden journey.

The available Gem boosts are:

• Increased sales profit. This affects the money you make from transactions. A good general boost.
• More offline earnings. More money while you’re AFK. Another good general boost.
• Extended offline limit. Increases the time cap on offline earnings. Buying this depends on how much time you want to commit to actively leaving the game running. Most people need their mobile devices for other things, so it’s worth putting at least a few levels here.
• Longer sales profit booster. You should be using the booster whenever it’s available anyway.
• Bigger ad rewards. Ads give big rewards, and this amplifies those gains.
• Cheaper cooking stand upgrade cost. Each level only gives a minor discount. I’d rather spend the Gems on making more money.

Blessings

You can activate blessings to give your staff a short but powerful boost. Blessings can be accessed via the button on the upper left.

To activate a blessing, you’ll need to watch an ad. As blessings are very potent (seriously, speed buffs are fantastic) and they level up the more you use them, always keep these active. On top of that, watching ads also contributes to your VIP level; the higher your VIP level, the bigger of a passive revenue boost you get.

The Head Chef

Last but not least is your head chef. By default, this is the orange cat that you started with. Your head chef is special in that they can both prepare and serve dishes.

Unlike your other cats, the head chef can’t benefit from the usual repertoire of passive boosts. Instead, you need to equip them with a headgear, accessory, and fursona. Yes, that’s the term. These pieces of equipment can be acquired from the gacha, though note that they tend to drop as fragments, meaning you’ll need to pull an item several times before it gets added to your inventory, and any further duplicates level up the passive boost. On the plus side, each accessory does have a sizeable bonus attached to it.

As with decorations, you don’t need to equip these items to your head chef to gain their boost. Just having them is enough.

Freebies

Successful entrepreneurs make use of every opportunity that presents itself, including free resources. Here’s where to nab free stuff.

Quick Tips:

• Whenever you’re given the chance to watch an ad to multiply earnings (AFK, lucky cat, etc.), take it.
• Cat Garden continues gathering resources while you’re AFK. Keep in mind that this is tied to both the AFK income and offline limit passive Gem boosts, so put some points in those two. You can watch an ad to multiply these gains.
• You can watch an ad to increase your gold gain for 10 minutes. Always keep this active.
• The Lucky Cat near the entrance will gather gold, and you can wake it to claim the gold. You can also watch an ad to multiply these gains.
• Your daily quests provide a low but steady flow of both catnip and Gems. These are accessible via the top button to the upper right of the screen, just below the mail and settings button.
• Achievements give you a one-time Gem reward for completing them.
• Take photos via the camera button (upper right) to get money for nothing. You don’t even need to share the photo.
• The chicken you got at the start of the game will lay eggs as it roams about. Pick up the eggs for some bonus gold and Recipe Research points.
• Newbies get one week’s worth of free stuff. You can optionally buy an extra pass to get even more free stuff from this. Access your freebies via the button below the dailies/achievements one.
• Check your mail whenever there’s a red exclamation point on it as freebies sometimes get handed out.
• There are three minigames you can play for more resources: coin toss, ramen making, and lunch box. Coin toss nets you resources, while ramen making and lunch box give you Meow Coins (used in the lunch box gacha, which gives you resources). The lunch box game pays out more than the ramen game.
• Each of these minigames is gated by lives, which replenish every hour when below a certain threshold – around 3 lives for coin toss (though you can watch 20 ads per day to skip these), at 5 lives for ramen making, and at 3 lives for lunch box.

AFK Rewards

Cat Garden has an AFK reward system. Even while you’re away, your cats will continue running your restaurant without any input. Bear in mind, however, that there’s a limit to how much they can earn while you’re AFK. This is governed by the AFK income and offline limit passive boosts.

Once you reopen the game, you can claim your goodies and optionally watch an ad to multiply your gains. Always go for the multiplier – that’s a lot of gold!

Ad Boosters

You can watch an ad to vastly increase the amount of gold you make for 10 minutes. Watch out for this button here when it pops out:

Tap on it to watch an ad and boost your gold production for a short amount of time. Once again, since multipliers are so effective in this type of game, always keep your ad boost triggered.

Lucky Cat

The giant cat near the entrance of your restaurant isn’t just for show, though they are quite striking.

As you play, this cat will accumulate gold. Once they have enough, you can tap on them to either withdraw that gold or watch an ad to vastly multiply (we’re talking 15-20 times) those earnings. Always watch the ad – that’s a gigantic amount of cash!

Dailies and Achievements

Cat Garden features a set of daily quests that you can accomplish to get important resources, most especially Gems and catnip. You can access your dailies by tapping on the upper rightmost button in the main menu.

As your daily quests are a fantastic, renewable source of both Gems and catnip, make it a point to do them every day.

You can also find your achievements in the same panel as your daily quests. These provide one-time Gem rewards, which are great for setting up your Gem boosts.

Quests

Apart from daily quests, there are also regular quests that you can complete for a small bonus. These seem to repeat the same objectives in a cycle.

Note that these aren’t retroactive (for example, if a quest asks you to upgrade kitchens or tables 20 times, upgrading them prior to getting the quest doesn’t count) so try to wait until you get the appropriate quest to maximize your rewards.

Photos

By tapping on the camera icon on the upper right whenever it has an exclamation point on it, you can take a screenshot.

Take a picture with that camera to get money for literally nothing. You don’t even need to share the picture.

Eggs

The chicken you get for free at the start of the game will wander around your restaurant and lay eggs.

You can tap on these eggs to pick them up for a small amount of free resources like gold or Recipe Research points. It’s not much, but it’s free.

Newbie Freebies

New Cat Garden players receive a week’s worth of freebies to help them get into the game. To claim your freebies, tap on the second icon on the upper right, just below your dailies.

Note that there’s a free and a paid path here, but even the free path gives decent stuff.

Mail Freebies

Be sure to check your mail every so often as there are sometimes free Gems in there.

Always check your mail when you see a red exclamation point!

Minigames

Lastly, there are minigames that you can play to get some nice rewards. In the early game, these are:

• The pond, where you play a coin tossing minigame. Time your tap to hit the center area of the bar to get a prize. It takes 80 minutes to regenerate coins; alternately, you can watch an ad up to 20 times per day.
• A ramen making game a la Overcooked. To play this game, tap on the ramen stand. In this game, you’ll have to make orders and serve guests while racing against the clock. Try not to flub it. The more you play this game, the more complex it gets, the more time you have, and the more Meow Coins (more on those in a little bit) you can earn. Each play costs a life, and you’ll regenerate lives every hour until you have five of them.

• A lunch box game. To play this, tap on the pink machine by your entrance. Here, you’ll drop sushi from the top of the screen into the box, and two identical sushi will fuse into one that’s bigger and worth more points. Fill the box as best you can within seven minutes or until it overflows. Each play costs a life, and you’ll regenerate lives every hour until you have three of them. Lastly, note that the Meow Coin payout from this is much better than the ramen game.

The Meow Coins you earn from both the ramen and the lunch box game can be spent at the lunch box machine. You’ll need 200 Meow Coins to pull on it once, and you can get a variety of useful prizes from it.

The Purrfect Pastime

Despite all these tips for optimization and making better business, ultimately, Cat Garden is about your restaurant. Build, upgrade, expand, and decorate as you please; at the end of the day, Cat Garden is a relaxing, casual game so feel free to tackle it any which way you want!

That concludes our guide to Cat Garden, and I hope that with this, you were able to learn the basics of building your empire. If you have any suggestions or corrections to make, let us know in the comment section!