Saloon Simulator Recipes: Bar Drinks and Food

Why Saloon Simulator recipes decide the day

A full bar is useless if the pour is wrong. Saloon Simulator recipes are the difference between a guest who tips and one who walks, and learning them early keeps the till moving while the story is still teaching you the building. In the first busy service, almost every order is a short prompt: glass, spirit, ounces, ice, and sometimes a stir or a shake. Miss one line and the drink fails even if the bottle was right.

Official screenshot · Source: Steam store

Saloon Simulator recipes also cover the kitchen, not just the rail. Beans, beef, onions, and a dessert can clear a table as fast as a shot clears the bar. The Saloon Simulator: Prologue on Steam describes a free tutorial-sized saloon with bartending, cooking, and a published set of 12 drinks and recipes (10 drinks plus 2 specials). Later early-access play, based on community reports, opens a wider daily menu, guest rooms, and upgrade costs. Treat the on-screen order as the source of truth, and use the lists below as a practice sheet.

How orders, glasses, and the recipe book work

Service is a matching game with a timer. Click the guest, read the glass and the pour, then build exactly that. Player experience from a day-two run shows three glasses doing most of the work: a bar glass for mixed and rocks drinks, a pint glass for cider, and a shot glass for a straight whiskey shot. Slurred callouts in footage (“plant glass,” “shock glass”) line up with pint and shot once you watch the prompt, not the chatter.

The recipe book sits in the drink interface. Open it when you forget a combo or when a skill lets you skip the pour. Community reports on the early-access build say drink skills can auto-make a glass on a cooldown: about 90 seconds for the first tier and about 60 seconds for the second. The same reports say the screen where you confirm an instant drink pauses the room, while merely browsing the recipe list does not. One player tested the menu with an empty dining room, waited out the button, and came back to several food orders that had stacked in real time. If you use the shortcut, stay on the confirm screen until it refreshes, then serve the next person immediately.

Food uses the same idea with worse forgiveness. Seasoning past the mark ruins a plate. Set the dish down in front of the guest; player experience says some customers will not reach for a plate left off to the side. Wipe tables between waves. A dirty top and a spiderweb read as neglect, and a neglected room loses the next sale.

Chairs matter before any of that on day two. Player experience describes a progress snag when seats were never set: guests had nowhere to eat, and the day would not advance. Place enough chairs with clearance so you are not dragging them through each other. You do not need the hammer out just to pick a chair back up.

Drink list from early service

These are not a datamined master list. They are the orders a day-two player actually filled, paraphrased from the prompts on screen. Ounces change by customer. If the prompt disagrees with this table, follow the prompt.

Straight gin and straight whiskey are the confidence orders. Three ounces in a bar glass, no ice, no lemon. Rocks versions add ice and sometimes a different ounce count, which is why memorizing “always 3” gets you in trouble. A doctor’s whiskey-on-the-rocks order in that footage was not the same pour as a later 3 oz whiskey, and the extra splash had to be fixed before the glass counted.

Cider looks too simple to fail, and players still fumble the glass. It is a pint, not a bar glass, unless a mixed drink says otherwise. Stone Fence is the mixed cousin: whiskey, apple cider, ice, stirred. One order was called out as 2 oz whiskey plus cider, stirred rather than shaken. Another was a lighter cider-forward pour with a single ounce of cider and ice. Same family, different ticket. Read it.

The Gin Fix is the first drink that teaches tools. Jack, the syrup seller, frames stirring as the subtle method that keeps a drink clean, and shaking as the one that chills harder and wakes the flavor up. You do not get a cobbler shaker. Player experience: cover the bar glass with the board he hands you and tap it on the counter a few times. The shown Gin Fix was a bar glass, 4 oz gin, one tablespoon of syrup, a lemon slice, and ice. A whiskey cocktail for the sheriff used the same idea without the gin: whiskey, syrup by the tablespoon, lemon, and ice. Pouring it neat because you were rushing is how that order failed.

Simple syrup is a story item and a recipe staple. Jack sells it as a cure-all elixir. The bartender correctly clocks it as syrup. It is meant for whiskey, heavy beer, and gin that needs rounding out. The first bottle in that scene was free; later bottles are a purchase, so do not burn tablespoons on drinks that never asked for them. A separate story beat hands you snake oil from a dead peddler’s crate. The doctor calls it a mixer, not a medicine you should serve straight. Player experience treats it as an optional flavor add-on, not a substitute for whiskey or gin. Do not assume every order accepts it.

There is also a skill pop for “One for the Road” after a run of correct specialty plates and drinks. It is a service perk, not a new bottle. Pair it with the instant-make skill from community reports when the bar stacks up, and keep manual pours for cocktails until you trust the auto-build to include lemon and syrup.

Food Saloon Simulator recipes and the pantry

The kitchen in early footage is small and specific. A supply run stocked beans, carrots, onions, organ meats, beef, and butter. Potato soup is talked about as something the stove can do once those bins are full. The recipe book, as the player flipped it, called out biscuits and gravy, fried offal hearts, and spicy plates. Names in a rushed video are messy (“fried official hearts” is clearly the offal-heart plate), so confirm the card in your own book before you cook.

A spicy order is where money and mistakes meet. The successful heavy plate in that run was beef, a hardtack stack, onion, beans, lemon juice, and cayenne, cooked as a combo rather than a single raw ingredient dropped on a dish. An earlier attempt died because the seasoning dump was too heavy, and the player only had one backup of a key item. Buy a cushion. Running the pantry down to one onion is how a four-person rush ends with one plate.

Dessert is easier than it sounds and easy to forget while the bar is shouting. The tracked dessert was butter, two hard sticks, and sugar. Guests who ask for dessert after a savory plate will not accept another steak. Keep sugar and butter reserved so the last ticket of the wave is not a shrug.

Samuel’s early delivery is the model for a first shop trip: spend what you can on food stock before you decorate. In that footage the supply bill was about $19, and the bar earned that $19 back the same day before any big upgrade. That is not a profit strategy. It is proof that recipes pay the grocery bill if you do not miss the tickets. A later $20 from a story errand covered the next gap. Neither number is a patch guarantee; they are player experience from one day-two session.

Community reports on the fuller early-access loop say cooking becomes the real earner after you buy Earl’s cast-iron stove. That tier-2 range adds a pricing option worth up to 50 cents on a meal. Across a full day of plates, those coins beat a sloppy gold-panning run. The same guide suggests ignoring optional spending until you can pay Locke about $200 at the end of the opening story, then upgrading in free play. Recipes first, furniture second, unless a quest tells you to buy something now.

Serving speed, rooms, and what actually makes money

Recipes only print cash if the guest is still in the building. A practical order of operations, drawn from community reports rather than from a developer patch note:

• Open on story objectives. Do not sink cash into cosmetic tiers until Locke’s $200 is safe.
• Stock the kitchen before you stock skulls and trophies. Empty bins fail more orders than ugly walls.
• Learn neat whiskey, neat gin, cider, Stone Fence, Gin Fix, and the whiskey cocktail before you chase rare mixers.
• Use instant-make on simple pours when the cooldown is up. Build cocktails by hand when lemon or syrup is on the ticket.
• Cook during lulls. If the cooking screen does not pause the bar on your patch, do not start a five-ingredient plate while six people are waiting.
• Wipe tables and clear webs between waves so the next seat is usable.
• After the story, buy the cast-iron stove, then tier-2 first-floor pieces with a Wealth+ stat. Community reports tie more Wealth+ items to guests buying a second item.
• Open the next guest room only when you can furnish it. Reports put a well-dressed room in the $7–$9 range per stay, and a dirty room cannot be re-rented until it is cleaned.

Side cash exists, and it is weaker than a clean service. Community reports put gold panning around $8–$13 a session, up to twice a week, wagon scrapping often near $3 and sometimes $5, and train deliveries easy to skip if they are not paying. A day of on-time drinks and 50-cent stove bonuses was described as roughly $100 when nobody walked out. That figure is one player’s method, not a balance patch. It still shows where the hours should go: the recipe book, not the map.

Rooms connect back to food. Earl will renovate, sometimes on a tab, and then ask for a hot salty plate because his road food ran out. Have hard biscuits and a savory card ready before you talk to him at the end of a shift. Charlie barters scrap for fittings rather than taking cash, which is how players start a guest room without another $19 grocery shock. None of that replaces the lunch ticket. A renovated room with no bed still does not rent, and a bar with no cider still loses the carpenter.

Mistakes that waste a good recipe

Most failed glasses in early footage were reading errors, not missing ingredients.

• Pouring 3 oz when the ticket said 2 oz, or the reverse.
• Shaking a Stone Fence, or stirring a Gin Fix.
• Serving cider in the wrong glass.
• Treating a whiskey cocktail like a straight pour because the sheriff was impatient.
• Seasoning a spicy plate until the card broke, with no spare onion or beef.
• Setting food where the guest would not take it.
• Letting tables crust over while you chased a side conversation.
• Buying décor while the pantry was one item deep.

If a drink “smells wrong” after you add syrup, check the tablespoon count before you blame the bottle. One filmed whiskey cocktail wanted two tablespoons; another attempt with a single tablespoon and a rushed lemon was the one the player knew they had misread. The board-shake also needs a real cover. Tapping an open glass does nothing.

Keep a tiny personal card by the monitor for the first week: glass, ounces, ice, stir or shake, lemon, syrup. Update it when a new order appears. The game is still expanding in early access, and a day-two list will not be the whole book forever. The Prologue’s 10 drinks and 2 specials are the on-ramp. The early-access service is the job.

FAQ

What Saloon Simulator recipes should I learn first?

Start with straight gin, straight whiskey, whiskey on the rocks, pint cider, Stone Fence, the Gin Fix, and a syrup-and-lemon whiskey cocktail. In the kitchen, learn one savory plate, one spicy combo, hard biscuits, and the butter-and-sugar dessert. Those cover the tickets shown in day-two player experience and teach every method you will reuse.

How do you shake a drink if there is no shaker?

Jack’s lesson in player footage is the method: set the board on the bar glass and knock it against the counter a few times. Use that for the Gin Fix (gin, about one tablespoon of syrup, lemon, ice). Stir Stone Fence instead. Stirring stays cleaner; shaking chills and mixes harder.

Do meals or drinks make more money?

Early on, drinks keep people in the room and food clears the bigger tickets. Community reports say Earl’s cast-iron stove is the first upgrade that matters, adding up to 50 cents on a meal. A careful full day of service has been described around $100, versus single-digit returns from wagon scrap. Pay the story debt before you chase furniture.

Is the Prologue recipe list the full game?

No. The Steam store page for the free Prologue advertises 12 drinks and recipes, split as 10 drinks and 2 specials, plus cooking as a system. Early-access community guides and day-two footage show a larger daily menu, guest rooms, and skill-based instant drinks. Always trust the order prompt on your current build over any written list.