How to Make the Best Dishes in Little Dragons Café

Aksys Games’ Little Dragons Café is out now on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch. Throughout the game, players work with their twin to run a rural café owned by their mother, who has mysteriously fallen into some sort of coma thanks to her mixed human and dragon blood. You’ll spend a lot of time raising a pet dragon who serves as the key to bringing her back to full health, too. That dragon will be cute, ideally.

There’s a lot going on inside Little Dragons Café, as the game blends a pet sim with café management, all rolled up with a colorful cast of characters. Expect to spend plenty of time behind the kitchen stove as you serve up steak bowls, sunny-side up eggs, satay, green salads, and more for your eager customers.

There’s plenty of techniques that go into making your dishes shine in Little Dragons Café. and if you want to thrill your customers and give your dragon the best meals your frying pan can offer, then here’s how to make the best dishes possible. Before we get started, here’s a quick overview of our top tips. We’ll dish more on the dishes, so keep scrolling.

Work on your rhythm

Let’s start with the basics. What you do behind the stove matters just as much as foraging ingredients. If you want your dishes to stand out, you’ll have to time your rhythm perfectly to the game’s cooking mini-game.

In Little Dragons Café, players put together their meals by hitting the matching button on screen while a short jingle plays. There’s some room for error if you aren’t matching the beat you can still make a decent meal. That said, if you want to make the best possible dish, then you’re going to have to shoot for an “Excellent!” rating on every single button press. The jingle itself increases in length as you add more ingredients, as does the difficulty involved in hitting every button.

Practice cooking dishes again and again, especially as you add more ingredients to a meal. Every recipe has its own little jingle. More ingredients makes more song, but the rhythm stays the same. Don’t worry if you mess up, as any duds can be fed to your dragon to boost their stamina and earn you more dragon’s manure. Speaking of…

Use your dragon’s manure

This tip should sound familiar if you’ve played Stardew Valley and other farming sims. Just like in those games, having soil chocked full of nutrients matters if you want your plants and fish to really stand out.

Of course, you can’t just dump your dragon’s crap onto your food while you’re working on the stove. That would be gross. No. No don’t do that. Rather, after collecting your pet’s poop on the second floor, you can run outside and off-load it into any resource collection area, such as your crop garden, a fish pond, or bushes growing carrots, onions, and more. Using manure will give you much better ingredients, which will lead to tastier and much more satisfying meals for both your dragon and your café’s visitors. Just wash your hands.

Dragon’s manure stacks, too, which means you can keep piling dragon’s manure onto your crop garden to squeeze out ingredients. If you’re running low on a specific dish’s meat or vegetable stockpile, it’s a great way to make sure your best ingredients keep coming in to your kitchen.

Cook with the best ingredients

You’ll want to use the best ingredients possible with your meals in Little Dragons Café, and that means more than just using manure. In the game, each ingredient has its own rating and rarity, which the game differentiates between through each ingredient’s musical note rating and its name. When you first start playing, you’ll generally find the game’s most common ingredients in the wild, ripe for the plucking. Start chatting with your guests, exploring the game’s world, and using dragon’s manure, and you’ll start to find ingredients that are a little rarer and tastier.

To make sure your menu items stay tasty from day to day, keep your higher-quality ingredients well-stocked. If you run out of Shiny Zucchi Bacon for your Steak Bowl, you’ll be forced to rely on regular Zucchi Bacon. And you don’t need to spend much time on Yelp to know that’ll hurt your satisfaction rating with customers.

Remake dishes with additional and secret ingredients

After you meet Luccola in Chapter 1, you’ll have a dedicated cook working at your café, which starts the game’s café management system proper. The longer an item stays on the menu, the more ingredient slots you’ll unlock, which will increase a meal’s satisfaction rating.

On the one hand, this expands the cooking song’s length and difficulty, but if you add extra ingredients into your dish, you’ll end up with happier customers coming to your shop. This is especially true of the game’s “secret” ingredients, which are unlocked after Luccola has made a dish for long enough.

Each day, check in on your menu items and see if Luccola has unlocked a new ingredient slot. If so, go ahead and recook the meal with your best additional ingredient. Make sure you have enough ingredients in your stockpile to float the expansion. The last thing you want is a delicious steak bowl that takes away ingredients from your customers’ favorite stir-fry.

Don’t forget to innovate

Most of all, don’t just throw together a dish with generic ingredients and slap it onto your menu. Whenever you earn higher quality ingredients, new ingredient slots, or alternate ingredients to try, you should head over to the kitchen and start cooking up a new take on your dish. Check out what your customers are saying too and study which dishes are your most satisfying among customers. You can check this out through either the “Update Menu” tab or the game’s nightly report screen, which includes statistics on your café’s orders and reputation.

As you continue stockpiling higher quality ingredients, you should keep returning to your menu’s dishes and improving them. It’s by far the best way to keep your customers happy in Little Dragons Café.