CHEF! September 16, 2026 CHEF! Day 4 Iteration 25

A Dish Needs a Plate

Plates are now a real resource. The restaurant owns 30, and each is always in one place: free, in use (a dish is on it), dirty, or washed and waiting to be put back.
A finished dish can't go to the pass without a free plate. The cook stays at the last station, still holding it, labelled "WAITING FOR A CLEAN PLATE", until one frees up. That also blocks any other cook who needs that station. Running out of plates never stops guests being seated; they just wait longer for their food, and their patience does the rest. Later, that wait can have its own consequences, like food burning on the grill.
Only plates that actually reached a table come back dirty when it's cleared, and a plated dish whose guest left goes straight into the dirty stack.
The Performance panel now shows free plates, plates in use, and total cook time spent waiting on plates, so you can see the plate cycle breaking down as it happens.
The dishwasher now matters. Over 10 games of 15 minutes, a default crew with a dishwasher never dropped below 17 free plates and lost 8% of its guests. Without one, the kitchen ran out of plates 7–8 minutes in every time, served exactly 30 guests (one per plate), and lost 52%.