Asian Cooking — Time Management, Order Stacking & Combo Multipliers | Peekade

Prep, then assemble

The most common scoring mistake is treating each order as a separate task. You don't cook one dish at a time — you prep all the ingredients for the current order *and* the next order, then assemble both. This single shift cuts plate time by ~40%.

Practical rule: as soon as you accept an order, prep its first two ingredients, then check the queue. If a similar order is in the queue, prep its first ingredient too while you're at the station.

The combo multiplier window

Combos in Asian Cooking trigger when you serve two orders within 4 seconds. That's tighter than it feels — you actually have to plan combos before the first order plates, not after.

Best combo setup: two orders that share an ingredient (e.g., two rice-based dishes). Prep the shared ingredient once, finish both dishes near-simultaneously, plate them in sequence. Combo multiplier triggers, score jumps.

Station discipline

Each prep station has a cooldown. Top scorers never wait at a cooldown — they always have something useful to do during it. The mental model: a station is 'free' the moment the last action started, not when it finishes.

If you find yourself standing still next to a stove waiting for it, either you didn't prep the next order's ingredients, or you didn't take a fresh order. Both are correctable.

Late-level menu compression

Late levels offer 6+ menu items. Naively, that's six recipes to remember. Practically, most are variations on three base recipes (rice, noodle, soup) with different toppings. Memorize the bases; the toppings are visual cues at the assembly stage.

Once you see Asian Cooking as 'three bases plus garnish' rather than 'six recipes,' top scores get a lot more achievable. Most score plateaus on this game come from holding the wrong mental model.