My customers give me a hard time about the food taking too long. Many of them are just up and leaving. How can I fix this problem?
I have 14 tables between the two floors.
2 captains. (Can't get anymore)
2 chefs. (Can't get anymore)
4 servers. (Not sure if I can get anymore, but I would think that's enough anyway.)
I have a dumbwaiter installed, with a porter specifically assigned to it.

Hi,
I don't have the game but i found this post by ProzacKat on the bigfish forums.
"If your staff is impolite you need to
a) Go to the management menu and make sure you invest money into training your employees. It will take a few days for the complaints to go, and every time you hire a new person you'll see complaints until their skill level raises.
Once your restaurant is fully staffed and well trained, you can lower the training costs to reduce your monthly expenses.
b) Go through all your employees and make sure you are paying them enough. Raise their salaries until their moral is like 80-100. As time goes by, make sure to go back and adjust their salaries to keep it that level.
Slow food times:
1) Click on your chefs, and click the skill button until you can see how many orders are in the que. If it's a lot, like 20 or 30, then you need more chefs. Each chef needs his own stove. In my big 3x4 restaurants, I put in 4 stoves, and add chefs as it gets busier. I keep 2 stoves in the 3x2, and 3 in the 3x3 size.
2) Click on your wait station. If there are a lot of orders waiting to be delivered, you probably don't have enough servers. If the orders waiting to be delivered gets over 20 I add another server.
Or you have enough but they have low moral or skills, in which case do the above.
3) I always assign each server to a floor; they seem more productive that way as opposed to leaving them on auto. I also need more on the 1st level.
4) In large busy restaurants, I put in 2 dumbwaiters and have 2 porters assigned only to using the dumbwaiters. I also keep 1-2 porters assigned to dishes only. They stand around bored a lot, but it helps for the dinner rush!
5) Make sure there is plenty of space around your tables. If they're too close, it slows down the servers. The upstairs dumbwaiters need to be easy to get to also.
6) Don't forget to make sure the chefs are well paid with high moral. A chef with a good attitude cooks faster.
One more thing, to help keep things from getting bogged up, I put 2 doors on my kitchens with a waitstation by each."
Thread in question is here

Namur:
- I'm not having a problem with the staff being impolite.
- I can't add any more chefs.
- I'm not sure if I'm at the maximum number of servers. Their skills are pretty good, but I'm not sure how their morales are doing so I will look into it.
- I'll try assigning servers to specific floors.
- I'll see what adding an additional dumbwaiter does.
- Space seems alright.
- Armand has maximum morale but his restaurant receives more complaints than Mario's, so I'm not sure if morale helps them go faster.
- I will try to add another doorway.
Thanks for responding to my post! I will try it out the next time I give it a go!
Any additional suggestions are welcomed!

I've got a few tips to add to help you out.
Put your tables at the sides of the room close to the wall, that way the waiter doesn't need to walk around the table to serve everyone. This decreases the time a waiter is tied to a table by quite a bit.
Serve the customers favourite food, which takes a bit of micro management. Pause the game and then double click the customer and then click the smiley dish picture. Set the price of the dish to decent amount and then with the chef to cook button choose the chef most skilled at cooking that dish. If you get the price right the customer will accept and just unpause the game for your guy to take down the order. You can charge quite a bit for favourite foods so this helps increase profits as well.
Namur's covered most the other points I can think of.

Old thread, but since new players are pretty much guaranteed to run into this problem, here's some extra info:

The biggest bottleneck in the campaign is the kitchen. You are never given enough chefs, which means you have to design your menu around dishes that are prepared quickly. Unfortunately, the little clocks in the recipe screen aren't particularly useful. They only indicate how much time is spent in the cooking animation proper, without accounting for the 'starting to cook' and 'finished cooking' animations. And if you follow a chef around, you'd notice that the oven, for example, has overly long animations. In comparison, the frying pan and the preparation table are way faster. This means you have to follow chefs around and note down what part of a stove each dish requires and what its actual cooking time is, then remove the slow ones from the menu and/or configure prices so that customers only order the slow ones if they are their favourites.

For some early game advice: The Mixed Casserole, Eggplant, etc. Torte and Steamed Mussels are prepared quickly, along with both starting appetizers, both soups, and the Strawberries Jubilee. The Stuffed Peppers, Dried Bean Casserole and both the Chocolate and Apple Tarts take their time in the oven. The Crepes Marcie are average. Of the 2 recipes you get from the first 2 cooking contests, the Fish Wellington is slow and the Carbonara is quick.
The only thing you'll miss from the slow ones is the Chocolate Tart. People love these and you can sell them for extortionate prices (I sell them for $18.00). But ultimately you have to consider if its worth it to see customers walk away without paying for their $50+ order just because you couldn't get the Chocolate Tarts out in time.

Note that none of this applies to breakfasts, since getting into a bottleneck with the breakfast menu (before 12:00) is nearly impossible.

Oh, and another thing: Sometimes, when they spawn, kitchen porters will block one or more chefs and/or cooking appliances, and they don't move! And if they're assigned to operate a dumb waiter, they won't move out of the way until customers get to the second floor! This is actually the one way to run into trouble during breakfast. So make sure to check your kitchens in the morning and if necessary rearrange things or change who's assigned to dishwashing and dumb waiters. Dishwashing porters will move out of the way as soon as the first customer leaves and their table is cleared by a server, so if they block anything, it's not as critical.

Beyond that, what was said above applies: Make sure servers are assigned to one floor only, make sure there's enough free space for them to get around (pathfinding is ultra-terrible), and have enough doors, waiting tables and dumb waiters to avoid bottlenecks.

Try to get more chefs here => http://www.homesocial.com.au/ :)

I got complaints with beverage list on my american cuisine restaurant.

when i open the recipe, there are no beverage.

how can i solve this complaint ?? can anybody help me ?

Surprise 'em with this unforgettable grilled chicken that combines tangy fruit and savory herb flavors. It's a peach of a meal!

your severs are lagging

Hi guys,

I have no clue what to do. My clients complain heavily on the delivery time (after whole day I have 100% or complaints). I have 5 waiters, 6 tables on the ground level and 6 on the first floor. I removed all time consuming dishes from my menu, added second door to the kitchen and another waiting station but still the sake trouble. About 50 complaints a day. Do you have any ideas what could be wrong?

Would need to know a little more to give better advice, but some of it is same as being said already. Make sure tables aren't too close together making it hard for people to navigate and slowing them down. Maybe assign 3 servers to ground floor and 2 to upper. Is your employee's morale up? If they aren't then they aren't improving skills either. Try to have at least 90 morale. Invest a bit into training if needed. Morale should be up in a few days, and their skills will start improving. Improved morale and skills means working more efficiently. With so few tables you probably don't have a problem with placing them too close together. unless you crowded them to keep room to add more later, but those are main things to do. As for chefs, if it's not main character, try to make sure their morale is up too. If don't have training option yet, increase wages to increase morale and therefore skills, but this can be very expensive and tedious to do each employee. I think it's better to wait til have training and invest at least a few thousand in the budget and wait out the complaints.

All that in mind, please note that if in scenario mode their are aspects of the game you don't get until later and while it is frustrating not being able to handle all the problems efficiently, sometimes you just have to deal with a lot of complaints until you can do something about it. (For example, the rude receptionist complaints before you can do training to help boost their morale and get their skills improving.) Or waiting for ability to get more chefs which will help improve serving times, but even then they lack skills they have to improve. You can assign them to different dishes they specialize in but then there might be some dishes you want to serve that no chef is good at yet and only way to get there is to get practice cooking it with orders (or hoping for a special customer to buy skill points by paying a ton of money which I don't find too agreeable. I prefer new recipes, selling recipes, and special ingredient customers).