Food King and Other Reasons to Make A Return Trip to Restaurant City

Have you seen this man? A mysterious figure called the Food King has been lurking around Restaurant City on Facebook. If you this bearded royal while visiting your friends' restaurants, click on him, and he'll reward you with a new recipe or special ingredient.

While we're feverishly hunting down the Food King -- who looks like he might be a distant cousin of the Burger King 'King,' -- we have give props to the Restaurant City crew. We've been a little down on Playfish's restaurant simulation game because, frankly, there wasn't much to it. After feeding the staff, cleaning up some trash and answering the trivia question of the day, we'd leave to catch up on our other 50 social games.

Slowly, more incentives have been added to make regular visits worth your while. You can now visit friends' restaurants and earn a 10-15 coins by helping them plug leaks, dig up poisonous mushrooms (see pic below) and chase away sleeping bears and thieving penguins.

Once you reach level 16 in the game, you can start to grow your own ingredients (for 2,000 coins per seed) in a garden outside the restaurant. The more you level up the more garden plots you unlock, which means more ingredients you get to trade or use to upgrade recipes.

Restaurant City has about 17 million active users, though those numbers have been in slight decline over the past few weeks, says AppData, while Zynga's rival game Cafe World has 30 million users and continues to grow steadily. We're not sure if the new mystery Food King and these other incentives will be a game changer for Restaurant City, but it's at least a start.

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