Once you recruit Kurtz to the Alliance and build the restaurant, you’ll unlock a new type of battle, the Cooking Battle! What may seem like a simple affair is much deeper than you may expect, and what’s more, you can recruit a new character after completing the majority of the battles. This page will explain all of the mechanics behind Cooking Battles, what each Character’s favorite foods are, and what to expect from every opponent. It’s time for a cookoff!

To summarize, winning a Cooking Battle is dependent on the following conditions:

• The judges the game chooses for you (this is random)
• The mood of the given judges (this is hidden)
• Whether you cook a judge’s favorite food or type that they like
• Cooking the right type of food for the right meal (e.g. an Appetizer for an Appetizer)
• How full the cooking meter is (mashing the button during cooking)

There’s a lot to dig in with here, so if you’re looking for a specific topic, hit one of the links below to jump to it:

• Cooking Battle Rules
• Appetizers, Mains, Desserts, and Styles
• All Characters Favorite Foods
• Cooking Battle Opponents

Cooking Battle Rules¶

In theory, a Cooking Battle is a simple affair. You and your opponent (of which there are 17 total) must cook three dishes for the Judges. The Judges are chosen at random from all of the characters you have recruited to the Alliance to date, there is no way to affect it. As you may expect, each character has their own likes and favorites, which is the main thing you want to aim for. For each dish, the four judges will rate it from 0-5 and the cook with the highest score at the end wins. Sounds simple, right? It’s anything but that so keep reading!

Judge’s Mood and Favorite Food¶

Yep, you heard that right, the mood of your current judges will affect how they score your dishes, which may explain why a dish may perform better sometimes. There is no way to see the mood of a Judge and no way to impact it, you’re at the mercy of RNG (Random number generation) here. The table below will show how a judge’s mood will impact their score and the chance of it happening:

Essentially, this means that if the judges are in a good mood, you’ll get a slightly higher score from them. If they’re in a bad mood, your score will be slightly lower. One thing to bear in mind is that if you cook a judge’s favorite food, you will always score a 5 from that judge regardless of other multipliers.

Appetizer, Mains, Desserts, and Styles¶

You’ll notice that you need to cook three dishes in a cooking battle, an Appetizer, a Main, and a Dessert. You may think that you can just cook three favorites, even if they’re all Mains, and for the most part, that will work unless you get unlucky with a specific batch of judges, but cooking the right type of dish does mean you will get maximum points from that dish. Cooking the wrong type will penalize you by a multiplier of 0.5. The issue here is, that the game doesn’t tell you what category a dish belongs to (beyond the obvious of a cake being a dessert).

Additionally, every dish has a style (such as Western, Chinese, Sweet, etc.) and a judge has a preferred style that can also help with choosing a dish. Once again, this is hidden from the player and sometimes, the other multiplier can make this point a bit moot.

The table below will list all of the dishes along with their styles and types:

All Characters Favorite Foods¶

As mentioned at the top in the rules, each judge has a favorite food, and this is arguably the most important part of a Cooking Battle since unless you get extremely unlucky, you can win most battles by cooking three favorite dishes, ignoring everything else. Unlike the table above, the game does give you a way of finding out what each character’s favorite food is. The first is by the speech bubble when they’re being introduced (although now always), and the second is by paying B’baba to uncover lore about each character.

The table below will list every character, their favorite food, and their favorite style (from the table above):

Cooking Battle Opponents¶

To complete the Cooking Battle scenario, you must beat 17 total opponents, and after the 16th, you will recruit Celia to the Alliance. Still, you must beat the final opponent if you wish to collect all Recipes in the game (and nab the Achievement alongside it). You need to wait 10 minutes between each battle, and your opponent will show up so long as you leave the Inn and return.

The table below will list all opponents and the dishes they will cook. Using this information, you can determine if your given judges will favor the food cooked by your opponent:

Scroll of Heaven Location¶

There is one caveat to all of this, when you face Trey for the first time in the 10th Cooking Battle, you will lose no matter what. Between this battle and the rematch in the 15th Cooking Battle, you must seek out the Scroll of Heaven to be able to cook on equal terms.

You can find the Scroll of Heaven in The Seaside Cavern, progress through this dungeon, and near where it opens up to the door with the barrier, search in the southeast to find a glowing spot (you need to run towards the screen). This will not appear until you’ve lost to Trey in the 10th battle.

And there you have it, all of the knowledge you need to win the Cooking Battles, get the final recipes, and recruit Celia to the Alliance. For the easiest time in these battles, consider cooking three of the judge’s favorites.