How to play Little Chef, the daily cooking game

Every day at 01:00 Paris time, Little Chef serves a new dish. Everybody who plays that day gets the same one, so you can compare results with friends without giving anything away. The dishes come from every corner of the world: a soup from one country, a street snack from another, a dessert, a bread, a sauce.

Before you guess anything, the game shows you what it can without spoiling the answer: the dish's name, its name in its own language when there is one, its country, its category (main course, soup, dessert, snack and so on), a difficulty level and, for most dishes, a photo credited to its author. Those clues matter more than they seem, as we will see.

Each dish has exactly six slots. Every slot is one ingredient of the dish, and it already shows its quantity and its unit: 200 g, 2 tbsp, 3 cloves, a pinch, to taste. You never see the name until you find it.

• You pick ingredients from a list rather than typing free text. The list is sorted into aisles, as in a shop: vegetables, meat, fish and seafood, herbs and spices, starches and grains, dairy and eggs, fruit and nuts, sauces and condiments, and the pantry.
• You can filter by aisle or start typing to narrow the list. Names work in English and in French.
• A found ingredient fills its slot for good. The order in which you find them does not matter.

When a guess does not belong to the dish, it goes onto a « Not in the dish » shelf so you never waste a turn trying it twice. Guessing something you already tried costs nothing.

You start with five lives. Only one thing takes a life away: an ingredient that is not in the dish at all.

• Found: the ingredient is in the dish. Its slot fills and you lose nothing.
• Close: your guess shares the main word of a hidden ingredient, like pecorino for pecorino romano. The game tells you a slot holds a related ingredient, and you lose nothing either.
• Not in the dish: you lose a life.

The game ends as soon as all six slots are filled, or when your last life goes. There is no clock and no rush: you can stop, think about the dish, and come back to it later in the day.

Little Chef helps you when things go wrong. After your second mistake, when you are down to three lives, one empty slot shows the first letter of its ingredient. After your fourth mistake, with one life left, a second slot shows its first letter too.

A letter stays on its slot: it never jumps to another one. And hints are free in points: they only arrive because you lost lives, which is already the price. Use them to rethink the dish: a slot of 400 g starting with « P » in a southern European main course points somewhere very different from a pinch starting with « P » in a curry.

Each slot you find is worth 100 points. Some slots go one step further and reward precision: when the answer is a particular form of an ingredient, say a specific cut of lamb or a particular cheese, naming only the base ingredient finds the slot at the « found » level.

You can then try to be precise. The game offers a few variants and asks which one exactly. Pick the right one and the slot becomes « spot on! », worth 150 points instead of 100. Pick the wrong one and the slot stays found, simply without the bonus. No life is ever at stake when you refine a slot. Naming the exact ingredient straight away counts as spot on at once.

Six slots, all spot on, makes 900 points: the top score of any day. Once all six ingredients are found, the game invites you to refine the slots still at the found level before it serves the dish.

When the game is over, your plate gets one of five endings. They are decided by the number of slots you found and, at the top, by the lives you kept:

• Empty plate: no slot found.
• Half-baked: one to three slots found.
• So close: four or five slots when the last life goes.
• Dish served: all six slots, with at least one life lost along the way.
• Chef's kiss: all six slots without losing a single life.

Then the dish reveals itself: the six ingredients, which ones you missed, the full ingredient list with quantities, the steps and a short summary of the dish. You can share your result as a grid without spoilers, say whether you liked the dish, and see the countdown to the next one.

• Read the quantities first. A slot of 1 kg is the body of the dish: a meat, a starch, a vegetable. Teaspoons and pinches are spices. Millilitres are a liquid: stock, milk, oil, wine.
• Use the country and the category. A soup from Eastern Europe, a dessert from South Asia and a street snack from Latin America each draw from very different shelves.
• Start with the safe staples. Onion, garlic, salt, oil and butter appear in a huge share of savoury dishes; flour, sugar, eggs and butter in baking. They are cheap guesses with a high hit rate.
• Listen to « close ». A close result is free information: the dish uses a related ingredient, so try the more specific form of what you just guessed.
• Look at the photo. Colours, garnish and texture often give away a herb, a cheese or the starch underneath.
• Save precision for the end. Refining never costs a life, so there is no hurry: find the slots first, then go back for the 50-point bonuses.

And when the first letter arrives, combine it with the quantity: a letter alone is vague, a letter plus « 2 cloves » is often enough.

Little Chef keeps your record without an account: games played, the share of dishes served, perfect games, your current and best streak, and a chart of how many slots you usually find. It also counts how many slots you have found spot on and how many at the found level only.

Your streak grows with every day on which you finish the dish of the day, whatever the ending. Sign in to a free Letsdle account if you want to keep your games across devices; the same Letsdle profile follows you on every game of the family.