Even so, focusing on the restaurant is ultimately more profitable than focusing the farm, since the latter requires having many friends to buy your supplies.

Alternatively, you can buy supplies from the greedy NPC Big Mart, who charges $1,740 in coins for items like carrots, which take only ten minutes to grow. Players are allowed to put excess crops up for sale, and your recipe book gives you the option of seeing what your friends have available if you’re unable to cook something. Of course, if all this sounds like too much work, Gourmet Ranch‘s social elements allow you to focus on either the farming or restaurant element more or less exclusively.

Each stove and counter can only hold one item, and servings, like crops, can spoil if not used. Waitresses will then serve these to your customers (whose hip attire in the rural setting implies that Gourmet Ranch is some posh Napa Valley outfit), who will in turn cause your restaurant’s popularity to rise based on the diversity of your dishes. After planting your crops and fencing in your animals (which take anywhere from several minutes to several days to grow), you can then harvest them and cook up any number of tasty organic dishes on your stoves and then place them on a counter. Unlike many real-life organic restaurants, which are often suspiciously disconnected from farmland, the restaurant in Gourmet Ranch is conveniently located next to your crops. Unfortunately, it brings little else to its outrageously expensive tables, but disgruntled Zynga ex-pats seeking a change of scenery will find much here to enjoy. Playdemic’s Gourmet Ranch is one of the more precocious children, brilliantly combining familiar restaurant and farming methods in one chic little package. Popular social games such as Farmville and Café World are all grown up now, and evidently they’ve decided to hook up because their hybrid children are running wild on Facebook. Gourmet Ranch entertains without breaking much new ground.

Gourmet ranch game