How to make a restaurant game in Roblox Studio

What makes a restaurant game work

The loop in one line: take an order, gather and cook, serve before the customer gets impatient, earn money and tips, buy upgrades, serve more customers faster.

• A readable kitchen. Players should know where everything is after one order. Group stations in the order a dish is made.
• A gentle rush. Customers that wait a little less as the day goes on create pressure. Too much and it becomes stressful; too little and nothing matters.
• Visible progress. A new oven that cooks faster or a second floor of tables is something players see every time they look up.
• Jobs for friends. One player cooks, one serves, one cleans. Co-op restaurant games keep groups together for hours.
• Decor that is yours. Letting players choose tables, colours and themes turns a kitchen into their place.

A restaurant game can lean towards a tycoon (buy buttons and income), towards a roleplay (jobs in a town), or stay a fast cooking game. Pick one before you build the menu.

The systems you need

Build plan: from a baseplate to launch

First playable

1. Build a small kitchen from parts: a fridge for each ingredient (Bun, Patty, Lettuce), a stove, and a bin. Give each fridge a ProximityPrompt and a Gives attribute with the ingredient name; give the stove and bin prompts too, and put them all in a folder named Stations.
2. Add a counter with one customer: a dummy model with a ProximityPrompt and an Order attribute.
3. Add the kitchen script below. Collect the ingredients, cook the patty, serve, and watch your money go up.
4. Add a HUD that shows the Plate attribute (what you carry) and a bubble over the customer that shows the order.
5. Make customers come and go: after a served order, the customer leaves and a new one arrives with a random dish.

First public test

Three dishes, four tables, two upgrades. Watch the time from a customer sitting down to being served. If new players take far longer than you, the kitchen layout or the order display is the problem, not the players.

What to add for launch

• Six to ten dishes, unlocked as the restaurant grows.
• Patience bars and tips: the faster the service, the bigger the tip.
• Upgrades that change how you play: a faster stove, a second fridge closer to the counter, a waiter NPC.
• Decor with a few themes, and saving for money, upgrades and decor.
• Co-op: let friends join your restaurant and share the tips.
• The Maturity and Compliance Questionnaire in the Creator Dashboard: Roblox restricts who can play a game without content maturity information.

The defining mechanic: cook, plate and serve

The kitchen script keeps each player's plate on the server as a list of ingredients. Fridges add an ingredient, the stove turns a raw patty into a cooked one, the bin empties the plate, and a customer's prompt serves it. The server compares the plate with the dish in the customer's Order attribute: same ingredients, any order, and the player is paid.

Workspace
  Stations Folder
    BunFridge Part        ProximityPrompt, attribute Gives = "Bun"
    PattyFridge Part      ProximityPrompt, attribute Gives = "RawPatty"
    LettuceFridge Part    ProximityPrompt, attribute Gives = "Lettuce"
    Stove Part            ProximityPrompt
    Bin Part              ProximityPrompt
  Customers Folder
    Customer Model        ProximityPrompt in its root part, attribute Order = "Burger"
ServerScriptService
  Kitchen Script new

-- Script in ServerScriptService named Kitchen.
-- Each player's plate lives here. Stations change it; customers check it and pay.
local Players = game:GetService("Players")

local MENU: { [string]: { ingredients: { string }, price: number } } = table.freeze({
	Burger = { ingredients = { "Bun", "Patty", "Lettuce" }, price = 15 },
	Salad = { ingredients = { "Lettuce", "Lettuce" }, price = 8 },
	PlainBurger = { ingredients = { "Bun", "Patty" }, price = 10 },
})
local MAX_ON_PLATE = 5

local plates: { [Player]: { string } } = {}

local function plateOf(player: Player): { string }
	local plate = plates[player]
	if not plate then
		plate = {}
		plates[player] = plate
	end
	return plate
end

local function showPlate(player: Player)
	player:SetAttribute("Plate", table.concat(plateOf(player), ", ")) -- the HUD reads this
end

local function sameIngredients(plate: { string }, needed: { string }): boolean
	if #plate ~= #needed then
		return false
	end
	local counts: { [string]: number } = {}
	for _, item in needed do
		counts[item] = (counts[item] or 0) + 1
	end
	for _, item in plate do
		local left = counts[item]
		if not left or left == 0 then
			return false
		end
		counts[item] = left - 1
	end
	return true
end

local function pay(player: Player, amount: number)
	local leaderstats = player:FindFirstChild("leaderstats")
	local cash = leaderstats and leaderstats:FindFirstChild("Cash")
	if cash and cash:IsA("IntValue") then
		cash.Value += amount
	end
end

-- Stations
for _, station in workspace:WaitForChild("Stations"):GetChildren() do
	local prompt = station:FindFirstChildWhichIsA("ProximityPrompt")
	if not prompt then
		continue
	end
	prompt.Triggered:Connect(function(player)
		local plate = plateOf(player)
		local gives = station:GetAttribute("Gives")
		if typeof(gives) == "string" then
			if #plate < MAX_ON_PLATE then
				table.insert(plate, gives)
			end
		elseif station.Name == "Stove" then
			local raw = table.find(plate, "RawPatty")
			if raw then
				plate[raw] = "Patty" -- a real game would wait a few seconds here
			end
		elseif station.Name == "Bin" then
			table.clear(plate)
		end
		showPlate(player)
	end)
end

-- Customers
local function setUpCustomer(customer: Instance)
	local prompt = customer:FindFirstChildWhichIsA("ProximityPrompt", true)
	if not prompt then
		return
	end
	prompt.Triggered:Connect(function(player)
		local order = customer:GetAttribute("Order")
		local dish = if typeof(order) == "string" then MENU[order] else nil
		if not dish then
			return
		end
		local plate = plateOf(player)
		if not sameIngredients(plate, dish.ingredients) then
			return -- wrong plate: nothing happens, the player can fix it
		end
		table.clear(plate)
		showPlate(player)
		pay(player, dish.price)
		-- next order for this customer (in a full game, a new customer walks in)
		local names: { string } = {}
		for name in MENU do
			table.insert(names, name)
		end
		customer:SetAttribute("Order", names[math.random(1, #names)])
	end)
end

local customers = workspace:WaitForChild("Customers")
for _, customer in customers:GetChildren() do
	setUpCustomer(customer)
end
customers.ChildAdded:Connect(setUpCustomer)

Players.PlayerAdded:Connect(function(player)
	local leaderstats = Instance.new("Folder")
	leaderstats.Name = "leaderstats"
	local cash = Instance.new("IntValue")
	cash.Name = "Cash"
	cash.Parent = leaderstats
	leaderstats.Parent = player
	showPlate(player)
end)
Players.PlayerRemoving:Connect(function(player)
	plates[player] = nil
end)

Because the menu is one table, a new dish is one line: its name, its ingredients and its price. To add cooking time, disable the stove's prompt, wait with task.wait, then swap the patty and enable it again. For a tip, store the time the customer sat down in an attribute, and pay a bonus that shrinks the longer the order took.

The hard part: flow and pacing

A restaurant game lives or dies on how it feels to be busy. The kitchen and the customer rate have to be designed together:

• Walking time is the real difficulty. Measure how many seconds it takes to make each dish, including walking. That number, not the menu length, decides how hard a rush is. Upgrades that move a fridge closer are as valuable as a faster stove.
• Customer rate follows the players. Spawn the next customer based on how many orders are open per player. Two open orders per cook is busy; five is chaos.
• Patience that forgives. A customer who leaves after ten seconds punishes new players. Start long and shorten it as the restaurant grows.
• Mistakes cost little. A wrong plate goes in the bin and costs an ingredient, not money. Players learn faster when mistakes are cheap.
• Fewer NPCs, better moving. Each walking customer is a Humanoid; dozens at once get heavy. Cap the customers per restaurant and reuse models.

Monetization that fits a restaurant game

Restaurant players pay to grow faster and to make the place look like theirs. Both fit, as long as a free player can still build a great restaurant:

A developer product must be granted through MarketplaceService.ProcessReceipt so a purchase is never lost; the game pass guide covers pass checks and prompts. A subscription must keep its benefits for the full term, and changing the private server price cancels every active private server subscription. Roblox also pays creators through Creator Rewards, which replaced engagement-based payouts on 24 July 2025. Rewarded video ads, where your game qualifies, must reward a developer product and cannot be random: double tips for five minutes fits. The Robux tax calculator shows what a sale earns after Roblox's cut.

What brings players back

• A saved restaurant. The upgrades and decor a player paid for are the strongest reason to return.
• New dishes and themes. Because dishes are lines in one table, each update can add a few. A seasonal menu is an easy event.
• Daily specials. A dish of the day that pays double, picked from the date.
• Ratings. A star rating for the restaurant that rises with good service, shown on a leaderboard.
• Daily rewards and codes. Cash or a decoration for a streak (daily rewards, codes).

Build a restaurant game with RoCode

RoCode is an independent AI agent for Roblox Studio. You describe what you want in a web chat, and its free Studio plugin writes the Luau and creates the scripts, parts and UI in the place you have open. For a restaurant game it works in rounds: first the kitchen and one dish, then customers and orders, then upgrades and decor.

Build this in Studio ↗

It cannot make custom food meshes or animations, publish the game, or tell you whether the rush feels right: you still run the kitchen yourself. Free credits every day, no card needed. How RoCode builds a game.

Questions

Sources and further reading

• Roblox Creator Docs: ProximityPrompt. Triggered gives the player who used it
• Roblox Creator Docs: attributes
• Roblox Creator Docs: TextService. filtering text players write
• Roblox Creator Docs: Developer products
• Roblox Creator Docs: Subscriptions
• Roblox Creator Docs: Creator Rewards
• RoCode guide: Tycoon script
• RoCode guide: Shop GUI

How the code was checked: every script on this page passes Luau's strict type checker against Roblox's API definitions (luau-lsp, 4 November 2026). A type check catches misspelt APIs and wrong types, not game logic, so playtest in Studio before you publish.