The game places the player in a 3-D kitchen environment and tasks them with cooking meals to be judged upon completion.[3] The kitchen features multiple working areas, each with a dedicated camera angle.[4]
From a first-person perspective, players utilize the motion controls of the Wii Remote and Nunchuk to cook and prepare food.[3] Meals consist of multiple dishes which must be served at the same time so that they remain hot enough to be enjoyable; the game requires the player to manage their time while cooking. There is also an ability to speed up the flow of time to skip the tedious waiting periods between recipe steps, but it must be used cautiously to avoid missing timing cues for certain next steps.
There are twelve recipes, half of them being American and half of them being international, split among the three daily meal times (breakfast, lunch and dinner), ranging from a cheeseburger with a side of potato salad to a homemade marinara pasta dish,[4] and the game's instruction manual contains an appendix that provides real-life instructions on how to cook each of them, based on the recipe book Food Network: How to Boil Water. The game responds to the player's performance during and after the recipe, with Food Network's Mory Thomas and Susie Fogelson (appearing in the game in shrunken form after warping through a television screen) providing in-game commentary about real-life cooking tips and the player's performance, as well as judging and assessing the recipe's final score with a taste test.[3]
