Grill Masters: Idle Barbecue Guide: Tips, Tricks and Strategies

Grill Masters: Idle Barbecue puts you into the shoes of a barbecue joint’s owner who just loves preparing delicious grilled and smoked dishes to guests. Your objective is to expand his business by hiring more chefs, servers and serving various types of dishes to visitors. You will be taking orders from guests, cleaning tables and upgrading chef and staff to speed up serving food to visitors. As you progress, you will be able to open a chain of stores, where new guests arrived and new dishes unlocked, including featured barbecues.  

Grill Masters: Idle Barbecue

Grill Masters is an idle game, but you may have to interact by tapping on speech bubbles above guests to take orders quickly, cleaning the table by tapping on leftovers so that new guests keep arriving at the tables and tapping on the chef to speed up grilling dishes. Chefs and servers will keep cooking food and serving guests on their own, but you will have to tap to speed up earnings. These tips, tricks and strategies will help you earn bonus coins, unlock new locations faster and expand your virtual barbecue business. 

Don’t Spend Coins to Unlock Tables   

Having more tables will ensure people won’t have to wait in a queue. With more tables unlocked, you will earn more as your barbecue restaurant will accommodate more customers. At the beginning of each new restaurant outlet, you can open all tables either using in-game coins or watching ads.  

Unlock tables by watching videos

I wouldn’t recommend spending coins to unlock a table. Save coins for dish upgrades and upgrades for chefs, publicity and staff. On a locked table you will see the “free” button. Tap on it to watch a 30-sec video. After the video finishes, you will unlock the table. Once you unlock it, you will see another locked table with a “Free” button above it – tap on the free button to unlock it. Do this for all tables. This way you will be saving a lot of coins, which should be used for other purposes.  

Upgrade Staff, Chef and Publicity  

In Grill Masters: Idle Barbecue, there will be three upgrades on the bottom of the screen: Staff, Chef and Publicity. Upgrading these will provide certain benefits that will ultimately help you serve more customers in a short period of time:   

Staff: Tap on the staff button to upgrade it. Every time you tap on it, you will increase the speed of servers or “waiters” serving dishes to customers.  

Chef: When you tap on the chef upgrade button, you will increase his cooking speed by a certain percentage. You can also manually accelerate a chef’s cooking speed. Just tap and hold the chef area to increase their cooking speed.   

Publicity: Increase publicity speed to make sure that visitors keep arriving at the restaurant at a much faster rate. Don’t forget to tap on the “queue” to max out guests before upgrading publicity.  

Increase Staff and Chef Count to Serve Dishes Faster 

With more chefs, various dishes will be cooked simultaneously. Having more servers or waiters will ensure guests won’t have to wait at the tables for long. Dishes will be served to all them at the same time and the tables will be cleaned quickly.  

Add Staff and Chef
When the upgrade buttons on the bottom turns yellow, it means you can add another chef or server when you tap on them

To add an extra server, keep tapping on the “Staff” button until it turns yellow. The staff button will show “Number +1”, means that you can add another server in your restaurant if you tap again. However, make sure you have the required coins with you before tapping.  

Do the same for the chefs. Keep tapping until the “Chef” button turns yellow. You will see the same “Number +1” text on it. Tap again to unlock a new chef.  

Max out the number of chefs and servers and you earn more money by serving several dishes simultaneously. This will ultimately allow you to earn a lot of tips from customers. 

Get the Big Stomach King to Obtain Bonus Earnings  

The Big Stomach King, a burly, always-hungry guy, appears randomly while you are busy serving guests in Grill Masters: Idle Barbecue. His portrait (circle) will appear on the left side of the game screen. It will remain there for a few seconds. Tap on his portrait before time’s up. Next, tap on the “Serve” button and watch a 30-second video to activate this perk.  

After a few seconds a large guy will drop onto your restaurant with a loud thud. All your servers will line up to serve the Big Stomach King until time’s up and he will pay a handsome price for each dish served to him. At the end of the session, the game will show how much coins you have earned from the Big Stomach King. Make sure you tap on x2 and watch a video to double the amount of coin earned from him.  

Increase the price of Dishes  

As more and more guests throng your restaurant and demand increases, it makes perfect sense to increase the price of each dish. Tap on the dish portraits just above chef/staff upgrades to raise their price. You can also unlock new dishes with the coins you have already earned from guests. The higher the price of each dish, the more will be your total earnings, which can then be used to upgrade your dishes and level up chef, staff and promotion.  

Collect Stars and Hearts Dropped by Guests  

Stars and hearts are randomly dropped by guests. Tap on a star and heart to collect them and fill both meters located on the upper-right corner of the screen.

Collect stars and hearts to fill the meters on the upper right corner of the screen

Once you collect the required number of stars, you can begin “Hot Sell”. Tap on the glowing star meter to start hot sell – everything from cooking food to taking orders/serving customers and cleaning tables will performed at x2 or x3 speed. You will earn a lot of money at a very short period of time. Hot Sell will remain active for 30 seconds. After it’s over, make sure you double the earnings.  

When you collect stars, you fill the star meter. When it’s full, tap on the star meter to open “treasure chest box”. You will get diamonds and other rewards from the box.  

Earn Offline Earnings When You are Not Playing 

In your idle barbecue restaurant, chefs will continue cooking lip-smacking dishes, servers will continue serving them to guests and visitors will continue arriving at your restaurant even when you are not playing. You can come back any time and collect offline earnings, but make sure you double them by watching a short video. You will need a lot of money to upgrade everything, from dishes to chefs and staff and so it’s very important to double the amount every time you come back to play the game.  

How to Unlock a New Location/Branch  

In Grill Master: Idle Barbecue, there is more than one condition to unlock a new location or branch.   

  1. Tap on the map, on the top of the screen. This map is located just beside your portrait pic on the upper-left corner of the screen. To unlock a new location in the map, you must first reach a certain level.  

For example, to unlock the Riverside Store branch, you must reach level 75 first. The level up meter on the top-right corner of the screen fills up every few seconds. Tap on it when the meter fills up and turns yellow to level up. You will receive bonus coins on leveling up. Keep tapping the yellow button to level up until you reach the required level to unlock a new branch. A new location is ready for unlocking in every 25 levels (level 25, 50, 75, 100, 125 and so on).  

Max out upgrades
Level Full for all dishes and upgrades
  1. Reaching a certain level is the first condition. The next condition is to max out everything in the current branch/location. These are:   

Staff, Chef and Publicity Upgrades – Keep upgrading these three until you see “Level Full”.  

All food items: Unlock all food items on the bottom of the screen and upgrade them until you see “level full” on each item.  

Once you have maxed out all upgrades and food items and reached a particular level, you can unlock a new branch/location in this game.  

Obtain Bonuses from Guests 

While serving guests, you may have noticed a green exclamation mark appear above a customer. Tap on it and you will be given three choices – Discount, Chat and Random Reward.  

Under Discount, you will receive a star or a heart. Under Chat, the customer will tell you a short story about his/her life. In Random Reward, you might get coins, stars or hearts if you watch a video.  

Obtain Bonuses from guests

Of these three, I would recommend tapping on “Discount” or “Random Reward”. In case you may have lots of coin and are not concerned about collecting hearts and stars, you can tap on chat. Except for reading a happy or sad story, you won’t acquire anything.  

Get Bonus Rewards from the Lucky Bag 

The lucky bag contains lots of rewards. All you have to do is tap on the bag, which is located on the left side of the screen and then tap on “Obtain”. You will have to watch a video to get your rewards.  

Complete Tasks and Achievements to Earn Diamonds 

The task button (trophy icon) is on the left side of the screen. Tap on it when a notification appears on it. Have a look at all tasks and achievements and finish them one by one to get diamonds.  

Diamonds can be used to obtain coins at the “Mall”. Collect diamonds from tasks and achievements and use them to acquire a lot of coins.  

Earn more from Featured Barbecues  

Featured Barbecue makes its appearance starting from the second location. These special dishes are larger than normal ones, are served on big plates and their prices are very high.  

Featured barbecue

Whenever a guest orders a featured dish, tap on the dish above him and it will be grilled automatically. When grilling finishes, servers will carry that big barbecue dish to the guest and you will earn a lot of coins once he/she finishes eating it. Featured barbecues have separate grill area and they are cooked automatically on them.  

You will unlock a featured dish in a beginning of a new location. Once you unlock it, tap on the “Featured” on the left side of the screen. Now tap on the wooden crate below a featured dish to get a +10 percent bonus coins on its sell price.  

To unlock the next +10 percent bonus, you will have to fulfill certain conditions. You can view those conditions under the “featured” section. 

For example: you will unlock the “Cucumber” barbecue when you reach the “Park Store” location. It’s the third location and can be unlocked when you reach level 75 and max out all upgrades.  

When a guest orders cucumber, tap on the speech bubble above him and it will be grilled. Servers will then serve the cucumber featured dish to that customer.  

To get 10 percent extra, tap on the “featured” link on the left side of the screen. Now tap on the “wooden” crate just below Cucumber to get +10 percent bonus earnings from this dish.  

To unlock the next 10 percent, read the conditions under cucumber – You will have to collect 3 1-star featured barbecues that belongs to the same “Amazing Moments in the Serene Days” collection. Cucumber belongs to the “Amazing moments…” collection, but you will have to get three more dishes (might be of the same type, i.e., cucumber barbecue) to further increase the sell price by 10 percent extra. You can get more featured dishes from the “Explore” mini-game or from the treasure box. Collect hearts from guests to fill the heart meter on the right side of the screen and open the treasure box when full.  

In Grill Masters: Idle Barbecue, a new featured dish unlocks when you reach a new location/branch. Keep an eye on the unlocking conditions and extra bonuses in the featured section. 

Last Updated on June 14, 2020 by Jude

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