Six Easy Ways to Get Ahead in Cafe World

Cafe World from Zynga exploded onto the social gaming scene last week, and in a matter of days has managed to gain 1.9 million followers. Much like Playfish's Restaurant City, this game puts you in charge of a small restaurant where you cook and serve customers for cash and experience points, which are both required to upgrade your cafe.

When getting started with Cafe World, here are six tips that will put you on the road to culinary greatness.
1. To gain experience quickly, cook as many bacon cheeseburgers as possible. They take five minutes to complete and every time you complete a batch, you rake in 7 experience points total. Repeat. All day long.

2. Before going to bed (in real life), put on a 12-hour dish, such as the Triple Berry Cheesecake, so you'll wake up in the morning with a fully cooked course ready to serve.

3. Cooking dishes that take a longer to cook will help you make cash fast. Just be sure to set a reminder to check back when it's done or it will go bad, and you'll have to start over from scratch. (That's a bummer, trust us).

4. To keep your restaurant rating from dropping when you're not playing, close your shop by removing the doors. To remove the doors, click on the chair-shaped 'Customize' icon in the game's menu. Then click and drag your door(s) off the screen, and they'll disappear. When you're ready to reopen, click the 'Customize' icon, and place the door(s) again.

5. Minimize the amount of space the waiter will have to walk to serve customers. Forming a U-shape with the tables -- the open end facing the stoves and serving counters -- is an easy way to pull this off. See image above as an example.