#who needs a cool interface when you can just stack everything up like plates

[badgraph1csghost]

they seriously laminated wikipedia huh. just like everything else, wikipedia gotta look just like all the other shitty ass “permanent mobile view” websites huh.

all you independent wiki admins don’t do this. this is a bad idea

[easyfoodnetwork]

A Hot Day in July

Peaches Hot House’s fried chicken packaged to-go

15 gallons of cocktails. 180 ramekins of aioli. How one Brooklyn hotspot has turned itself into a successful fast-casual restaurant during the pandemic

Before the pandemic, eating dinner at Brooklyn restaurant Peaches Hot House meant writing a name on a whiteboard in the vestibule and waiting to be called for a table in a packed dining room. The staff would point guests to the bar while they waited, and despite the fact that it takes up about a third of the room, it was almost as difficult to snag a seat there as it was at a table.

Today the seatless bar has a few menus strewn across it, the whiteboard reads “takeout and delivery,” and the furniture is stacked to one side of the dining room. A bench that used to provide seating for four people now serves as a barrier between the six-foot square of masking tape on the floor — the designated ordering zone — and the bar and kitchen. But despite of all of this, Peaches Hot House is busier than ever. On Thursday, July 2, the day’s sales are 64 percent higher than they were a year ago around this time.

“Even if it’s a busy night, you can only seat so many people,” says Damian Laverty-McDowell, the company chef for B + C Restaurants, the group that owns Peaches Hot House. Since the pandemic began, B + C added Grubhub and Door Dash delivery services on top of its existing relationship with Caviar. “There was a finite ceiling. When you add three new delivery service revenue streams, and you compound that by the fact that nobody can go out to eat, it flips all that right on its head. Now it is infinite.”

“Triple-batch everything.”

As the pandemic took hold, restaurateurs scrambled to figure out how to adapt their businesses to an industry that was being dealt unprecedented changes on a daily basis. “At that point, we didn’t know how many people we were going to be able to keep on,” Craig Samuel, one of the owners, says. “We didn’t know if [a Payment Protection Program loan] was going to be available, or if it was going to be available to us.” The owners of B + C devised a plan to furlough the majority of their staff, temporarily closing the other Hot House location, in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood, and funneling business and the remaining employees to the location in Bed-Stuy. “It was a decision that was made based on trying to remain a viable business,” Samuel says. “When [New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio] said that delivery and takeout were still available, we figured we’d be able to make it at at least some of the locations with that.”

The plan worked, but required restructuring Hot House into a fast-casual version of itself. The transformation is evident from before the restaurant opens at 11 on July 2. Norma Hunt, the restaurant’s operations manager, tells the staff to scale up their side work of portioning barbecue aioli and pre-batching cocktails. “Triple-batch everything,” she instructs. “So the work flow isn’t so bad tomorrow.” Claudia, a bartender who has worked at the restaurant for a week, mixes the restaurant’s four cocktails in buckets usually used to ship and store pickles. By the time the gate is rolled up, she has mixed 15 gallons of tequila, fresh watermelon, and lime juices, which will go into the frozen drink machine and become the Back Up Dancer cocktail. The Peaches Hot House beverage program has always focused on cocktails, according to Hunt, but since the shift to delivery and takeout, it has been streamlined to essentials: three drinks, bottled in three sizes, plus the Back Up Dancer (which is only available for pickup because it doesn’t travel well).

Staff who used to wait tables, now help package delivery and takeout orders.

The food has been pared down to the most resilient essentials. The updated menu, which Hot House has been serving since April, is two-thirds the size of the one before the pandemic. “I looked at all the numbers of what we were selling through each platform, and we narrowed down what people were actually eating,” Laverty-McDowell says. The burger and grilled broccoli are now the only items cooked to order. Everything else is made in larger quantities, with tweaks like replacing sauteed kale with braised collard greens, which can stay warm in a steam table without falling apart. The restaurant’s best-sellers, its Nashville-style hot chicken plate and fried chicken sandwich, are still there, and it sells a lot more of them.

The front-of-house staff, who used to ping-pong across the floor during service, are much more stationary now. Christina, who worked as a server and bartender at Hot House before the pandemic, spends the morning working the expediter position in the kitchen. When guests sat at tables in the dining room, an expediter worked with cooks to ensure that food coming off the line made it to tables at the right pace, tidying plates and occasionally running them out to the dining room. Today, her shift mostly consists of packing food into paper bags, bringing them out to what used to be the service bar, and stocking up for the dinner rush.

As she fills sleeves of to-go ramekins of barbecue aioli, she tells me how she has used her new position wrangling nearly 100 orders at a time as a means to also work on a personal goal that she set after being furloughed. “When I got let go, I was like, okay, I’m going to take this time to see if I can try to make myself better,” she explains. She says coming back to work the expo station has instead forced her to be more comfortable asking for help, which she didn’t ever do while working behind the bar in the old days. The new work has also resulted in physical changes: “I definitely dropped 20 pounds since coming back to work,” she says. “I used to struggle with one of [the cocktail] buckets; now I can hold two with no issues.” But she misses her old job and likens her new one to working in fast food, before adding that here at least she still gets to talk to guests when they pick up their orders. After 15 minutes, she has filled one fish tub full of about 60 ramekins. She needs to fill three more before the dinner crew gets in, but first she places an order of fried green tomatoes and a shrimp sandwich into a bag, staples the ticket to the front, and brings it to the dining room.

The lion’s share of Hot House’s orders come from delivery apps, and the combined sales from all three services — Grubhub, Door Dash, and Caviar — are 12 times what the restaurant sold on delivery apps on the Thursday before the Fourth of July in 2019.

Each app operates from its own tablet and interface, and prints its own order tickets (all of which look different from the tickets the restaurant’s point-of-sale system prints out for orders). Hunt notes that while the transition from table service to takeout has required adjustment for the staff, she has also noticed the impact on regulars, who have called the restaurant feeling frazzled after trying to order delivery from apps. “On day two [of the city on pause], I was helping someone set up an account,” Hunt says. “I’ve also been emotional support — I’ll stay on the phone while they place the order and confirm that they got it.”

Because 80 percent of the staff were laid off at the start of the pandemic, Hunt frequently worked as the only front-of-house employee while also ordering all the food, alcohol, and to-go boxes, as well as writing the schedule. The restaurant received a Paycheck Protection Program loan, allowing it to start to rehire employees in mid-May, and providing Hunt some reprieve from 70-hour work weeks.

As lunch dies down past 3 p.m., the dinner cooks, Ruben and Antonio, arrive. Chicken fries from before the restaurant opens at noon until just shy of 9 p.m., and hotel pans of cornbread laid out to cool on kitchen shelves are replaced with bundt cakes throughout the day. Yarel, who works the dinner expo shift, displays laser focus in organizing her station before the rush starts. It doesn’t take long for the printers to start churning, filling the pass in front of her with tickets, and the bartop with bagged orders.

Peaches Hot House is selling more fried chicken these days.

On the sidewalk out front, couriers wait on electric bikes, glued to their phones. One, holding the collar of his shirt over his mouth, walks past the sign on the door asking everyone to wear a mask. He is one of 26 people who come in flagrantly disregarding the sign that day. After a handful of confrontations with guests and couriers over mask use, Hunt approaches each instance on a case-by-case basis. “I try to figure out the safest way to handle a situation so that I’m not putting any of my staff at risk,” she says. For some regulars, that means ribbing them into wearing one. For others, it can mean simply trying to get them out as quickly as possible, or offering them disposable masks. “I acknowledge the privilege in access to PPE,” Hunt says, “and this neighborhood has a dramatic schism there.”

Hot House’s role as a neighborhood mainstay has worked to its benefit, according to Samuel. With the pandemic disrupting professional and personal routines, the residents of Bed-Stuy found themselves at home, not taking Ubers or dining out. Many sought to soothe themselves with comfort food from a neighborhood staple. The murder of George Floyd and ensuing civil unrest also contributed to an uptick in business. “We definitely had a huge bump because of it,” he says. “We were on everyone’s list of Black-owned businesses in Brooklyn.”

Much of Hunt’s night is spent bouncing between greeting regulars and answering questions about the menu. This isn’t unlike her role in the pre-pandemic days, except now she is also making sure the space doesn’t become overcrowded. She occasionally clears the room, raising her voice and asking everyone who isn’t placing an order to please wait outside.

Toward the end of the night, a man with a 5-month-old parrot on his shoulder yells an order for fried chicken and fried catfish through the open door. The parrot’s name is Leila, and her owner goes by Hot Sauce Mike. Neither entree is for the bird, who mostly eats seeds, but enjoys sugar as a treat.

“The way that everything had shifted actually ended up benefiting us.”

By Hunt’s assessment, it was a moderately busy service, but much more tranquil than some of the days she has worked in the past few months. Samuel is quick to point out that the boost in sales notwithstanding, Hot House is far from financial security. The increase in business is offset by delivery fees from apps, extra paper goods to facilitate serving all orders to go, and other increases in the cost of doing business that the restaurant has absorbed without raising prices. It also contends with struggles the industry has faced since before the pandemic, like rent hikes and increased labor costs.

In mid-July, Hot House added tables in front of the restaurant and started full-service outdoor dining, offering the closest thing it can to the pre-pandemic experience (as well as an extra revenue stream). Still, Samuel says that delivery orders are sustaining the business, and having weathered the first few months of the pandemic likely bodes well for the future of Hot House.

The worst is almost certainly behind Samuel. As the city and state governments were ramping up to ban indoor dining in mid-March, and he and his partners were trying to decide how to navigate the situation, he was also sick with COVID-19. His condition rapidly worsened, putting him in the hospital. “The next thing I know, I’m in a coma. I woke up, and found out that 25,000 people died. I was in a hospital without my phone, without contact, and [I] couldn’t call anyone. I was lying there thinking we’re dead. My career is over,” he says. “Later, I got in contact with my wife and talked to my partner. I realized that the way that everything had shifted actually ended up benefiting us.”

Ian Browning is a writer, skateboarder, and occasional bartender based in New York City. Clay Williams is a Brooklyn-based photographer.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2Q2u2nr https://ift.tt/3iGdkXg

Peaches Hot House’s fried chicken packaged to-go

15 gallons of cocktails. 180 ramekins of aioli. How one Brooklyn hotspot has turned itself into a successful fast-casual restaurant during the pandemic

Before the pandemic, eating dinner at Brooklyn restaurant Peaches Hot House meant writing a name on a whiteboard in the vestibule and waiting to be called for a table in a packed dining room. The staff would point guests to the bar while they waited, and despite the fact that it takes up about a third of the room, it was almost as difficult to snag a seat there as it was at a table.

Today the seatless bar has a few menus strewn across it, the whiteboard reads “takeout and delivery,” and the furniture is stacked to one side of the dining room. A bench that used to provide seating for four people now serves as a barrier between the six-foot square of masking tape on the floor — the designated ordering zone — and the bar and kitchen. But despite of all of this, Peaches Hot House is busier than ever. On Thursday, July 2, the day’s sales are 64 percent higher than they were a year ago around this time.

“Even if it’s a busy night, you can only seat so many people,” says Damian Laverty-McDowell, the company chef for B + C Restaurants, the group that owns Peaches Hot House. Since the pandemic began, B + C added Grubhub and Door Dash delivery services on top of its existing relationship with Caviar. “There was a finite ceiling. When you add three new delivery service revenue streams, and you compound that by the fact that nobody can go out to eat, it flips all that right on its head. Now it is infinite.”

“Triple-batch everything.”

As the pandemic took hold, restaurateurs scrambled to figure out how to adapt their businesses to an industry that was being dealt unprecedented changes on a daily basis. “At that point, we didn’t know how many people we were going to be able to keep on,” Craig Samuel, one of the owners, says. “We didn’t know if [a Payment Protection Program loan] was going to be available, or if it was going to be available to us.” The owners of B + C devised a plan to furlough the majority of their staff, temporarily closing the other Hot House location, in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood, and funneling business and the remaining employees to the location in Bed-Stuy. “It was a decision that was made based on trying to remain a viable business,” Samuel says. “When [New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio] said that delivery and takeout were still available, we figured we’d be able to make it at at least some of the locations with that.”

The plan worked, but required restructuring Hot House into a fast-casual version of itself. The transformation is evident from before the restaurant opens at 11 on July 2. Norma Hunt, the restaurant’s operations manager, tells the staff to scale up their side work of portioning barbecue aioli and pre-batching cocktails. “Triple-batch everything,” she instructs. “So the work flow isn’t so bad tomorrow.” Claudia, a bartender who has worked at the restaurant for a week, mixes the restaurant’s four cocktails in buckets usually used to ship and store pickles. By the time the gate is rolled up, she has mixed 15 gallons of tequila, fresh watermelon, and lime juices, which will go into the frozen drink machine and become the Back Up Dancer cocktail. The Peaches Hot House beverage program has always focused on cocktails, according to Hunt, but since the shift to delivery and takeout, it has been streamlined to essentials: three drinks, bottled in three sizes, plus the Back Up Dancer (which is only available for pickup because it doesn’t travel well).

Staff who used to wait tables, now help package delivery and takeout orders.

The food has been pared down to the most resilient essentials. The updated menu, which Hot House has been serving since April, is two-thirds the size of the one before the pandemic. “I looked at all the numbers of what we were selling through each platform, and we narrowed down what people were actually eating,” Laverty-McDowell says. The burger and grilled broccoli are now the only items cooked to order. Everything else is made in larger quantities, with tweaks like replacing sauteed kale with braised collard greens, which can stay warm in a steam table without falling apart. The restaurant’s best-sellers, its Nashville-style hot chicken plate and fried chicken sandwich, are still there, and it sells a lot more of them.

The front-of-house staff, who used to ping-pong across the floor during service, are much more stationary now. Christina, who worked as a server and bartender at Hot House before the pandemic, spends the morning working the expediter position in the kitchen. When guests sat at tables in the dining room, an expediter worked with cooks to ensure that food coming off the line made it to tables at the right pace, tidying plates and occasionally running them out to the dining room. Today, her shift mostly consists of packing food into paper bags, bringing them out to what used to be the service bar, and stocking up for the dinner rush.

As she fills sleeves of to-go ramekins of barbecue aioli, she tells me how she has used her new position wrangling nearly 100 orders at a time as a means to also work on a personal goal that she set after being furloughed. “When I got let go, I was like, okay, I’m going to take this time to see if I can try to make myself better,” she explains. She says coming back to work the expo station has instead forced her to be more comfortable asking for help, which she didn’t ever do while working behind the bar in the old days. The new work has also resulted in physical changes: “I definitely dropped 20 pounds since coming back to work,” she says. “I used to struggle with one of [the cocktail] buckets; now I can hold two with no issues.” But she misses her old job and likens her new one to working in fast food, before adding that here at least she still gets to talk to guests when they pick up their orders. After 15 minutes, she has filled one fish tub full of about 60 ramekins. She needs to fill three more before the dinner crew gets in, but first she places an order of fried green tomatoes and a shrimp sandwich into a bag, staples the ticket to the front, and brings it to the dining room.

The lion’s share of Hot House’s orders come from delivery apps, and the combined sales from all three services — Grubhub, Door Dash, and Caviar — are 12 times what the restaurant sold on delivery apps on the Thursday before the Fourth of July in 2019.

Each app operates from its own tablet and interface, and prints its own order tickets (all of which look different from the tickets the restaurant’s point-of-sale system prints out for orders). Hunt notes that while the transition from table service to takeout has required adjustment for the staff, she has also noticed the impact on regulars, who have called the restaurant feeling frazzled after trying to order delivery from apps. “On day two [of the city on pause], I was helping someone set up an account,” Hunt says. “I’ve also been emotional support — I’ll stay on the phone while they place the order and confirm that they got it.”

Because 80 percent of the staff were laid off at the start of the pandemic, Hunt frequently worked as the only front-of-house employee while also ordering all the food, alcohol, and to-go boxes, as well as writing the schedule. The restaurant received a Paycheck Protection Program loan, allowing it to start to rehire employees in mid-May, and providing Hunt some reprieve from 70-hour work weeks.

As lunch dies down past 3 p.m., the dinner cooks, Ruben and Antonio, arrive. Chicken fries from before the restaurant opens at noon until just shy of 9 p.m., and hotel pans of cornbread laid out to cool on kitchen shelves are replaced with bundt cakes throughout the day. Yarel, who works the dinner expo shift, displays laser focus in organizing her station before the rush starts. It doesn’t take long for the printers to start churning, filling the pass in front of her with tickets, and the bartop with bagged orders.

Peaches Hot House is selling more fried chicken these days.

On the sidewalk out front, couriers wait on electric bikes, glued to their phones. One, holding the collar of his shirt over his mouth, walks past the sign on the door asking everyone to wear a mask. He is one of 26 people who come in flagrantly disregarding the sign that day. After a handful of confrontations with guests and couriers over mask use, Hunt approaches each instance on a case-by-case basis. “I try to figure out the safest way to handle a situation so that I’m not putting any of my staff at risk,” she says. For some regulars, that means ribbing them into wearing one. For others, it can mean simply trying to get them out as quickly as possible, or offering them disposable masks. “I acknowledge the privilege in access to PPE,” Hunt says, “and this neighborhood has a dramatic schism there.”

Hot House’s role as a neighborhood mainstay has worked to its benefit, according to Samuel. With the pandemic disrupting professional and personal routines, the residents of Bed-Stuy found themselves at home, not taking Ubers or dining out. Many sought to soothe themselves with comfort food from a neighborhood staple. The murder of George Floyd and ensuing civil unrest also contributed to an uptick in business. “We definitely had a huge bump because of it,” he says. “We were on everyone’s list of Black-owned businesses in Brooklyn.”

Much of Hunt’s night is spent bouncing between greeting regulars and answering questions about the menu. This isn’t unlike her role in the pre-pandemic days, except now she is also making sure the space doesn’t become overcrowded. She occasionally clears the room, raising her voice and asking everyone who isn’t placing an order to please wait outside.

Toward the end of the night, a man with a 5-month-old parrot on his shoulder yells an order for fried chicken and fried catfish through the open door. The parrot’s name is Leila, and her owner goes by Hot Sauce Mike. Neither entree is for the bird, who mostly eats seeds, but enjoys sugar as a treat.

“The way that everything had shifted actually ended up benefiting us.”

By Hunt’s assessment, it was a moderately busy service, but much more tranquil than some of the days she has worked in the past few months. Samuel is quick to point out that the boost in sales notwithstanding, Hot House is far from financial security. The increase in business is offset by delivery fees from apps, extra paper goods to facilitate serving all orders to go, and other increases in the cost of doing business that the restaurant has absorbed without raising prices. It also contends with struggles the industry has faced since before the pandemic, like rent hikes and increased labor costs.

In mid-July, Hot House added tables in front of the restaurant and started full-service outdoor dining, offering the closest thing it can to the pre-pandemic experience (as well as an extra revenue stream). Still, Samuel says that delivery orders are sustaining the business, and having weathered the first few months of the pandemic likely bodes well for the future of Hot House.

The worst is almost certainly behind Samuel. As the city and state governments were ramping up to ban indoor dining in mid-March, and he and his partners were trying to decide how to navigate the situation, he was also sick with COVID-19. His condition rapidly worsened, putting him in the hospital. “The next thing I know, I’m in a coma. I woke up, and found out that 25,000 people died. I was in a hospital without my phone, without contact, and [I] couldn’t call anyone. I was lying there thinking we’re dead. My career is over,” he says. “Later, I got in contact with my wife and talked to my partner. I realized that the way that everything had shifted actually ended up benefiting us.”

Ian Browning is a writer, skateboarder, and occasional bartender based in New York City. Clay Williams is a Brooklyn-based photographer.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2Q2u2nr via Blogger https://ift.tt/30Rjz4d

[waynekelton]

The Best (And Worst) Auto Chess Games on Android and iOS

Dota Auto Chess is being heralded as “the next big thing” after its meteoric rise back in January 2019. While It hasn't quite managed to surpass the Battle Royale craze just yet, its potential has yet to be fully realised. Just as we saw with the Puzzle, MOBA, and Battle Royale genres in the past; clones, copycats, and tributes are quick to spring up across gaming landscape.

If you gave Dota Auto Chess a shot and have always wanted the option to play on the go, mobile is finally stepping up to the plate to deliver just that. The genre is spreading on PC thanks to Riot Games and even Valve itself. But with such lacklustre vetting processes on mobile, there are at least 5 cash-grab clones for every decent attempt at mimicking the formula. We've gone through the best and worst Auto Chess variants mobile has to offer right now, and we're ready to give some recommendations (and some hard passes).

And you needn’t worry about price. All 'Auto-Battler' games (legitimate or otherwise) are Free-to-Play. These things make their money through cosmetic micro-transactions like board skins and avatars – there’s nothing we’ve found so far that lets you spend real money to have an in-game advantage, which the way it’s meant to be done.

Those that don’t follow this model gain swift admittance into our 'Ones to Avoid' section.

Dota Underlords

Developer: Valve Platforms: iOS Universal, Android (PC, Mac)

In an unusual display of vigour, Valve have been anything but lax in getting their own, 'official' Auto Chess take out the door and into the hands of players. Available in beta across all platforms, Valve have essentially built on the original Dota Auto Chess mod and put their own unique spin on things. From little changes like bench size and how the various synergies work, to their own take on monetisation, ranking and an offline mode, Dota Underlords sports a fully functional tutorial, robust AI play, as well the ability to seamlessly transition a game between PC and Mobile.

While it's still early days yet, this is our favourite mobile version of the Auto Chess games so far, mainly because Valve have put a lot of thought into addressing many of the usability and quality of life issues the original game had on both PC and mobile (although, Drodo isn't slouching there either). It's really the offline play that cinches it - not only can you play against different difficulty levels, you can completely disable the round-timers so that you can take your time as you learn the ropes of Valve's blend of Auto-Battler. Anyone who's been wary in getting caught up in knock-offs or clones may also feel starting here a safer bet, before looking at some of the others below.

Auto Chess: Origin

Developer: Dragonest Game/Drodo Platforms: iOS Universal, Android

If you were quick to the scene on Android and assumed Auto Chess by Dragonest to be nothing but a Chinese copycat, you'd be forgiven. It happens with website domains all the time. But in actuality, this is the ‘OG’ Auto Chess game that started it all. It comes from the same developers - Drodo. Washing itself of its Dota roots, Auto Chess (or Auto Chess: Origin as it’s now known on iOS) is the real deal. 

Separating from its Dota foundation means Auto Chess: Origin no longer has access to familiar assets like sounds and models. So, while you might recognize its logo from the original PC version, you’ll find a pretty different looking game when you fire it up, with humour that might seem a little too juvenile for some. If you can get passed that, you’ll find a mobile replacement almost exactly the same as the PC version minus the obvious (and better suited) touch interface. It's added new pieces since first launching, and is also now starting to experiment with new game modes to try and stand-out from the competition.

Arena Allstars

Developer: Match Set Games Platforms: iOS Universal, Android

This is another recent newcomer, Arena Allstars is as innovative as it is kinda lazy. 'Optimised for mobile' returns as a selling-point, although in this game's case it's basically true - quicker matches, a vertical UI and lots of information on hand to help you figure out what's what. You'll notice on the screens everything from front-and-centre synergy guides, and you can even tap on your income to get a breakdown as to whether it's all coming from (Notice Interest makes a return in this game). Levelling up is also nice and seamless, and space concerns are addressed by allowing you to stack the same pieces together (provided they are of the same tier).

Other than that though, you'll kind of recognise all the playing pieces. Even that ability that fires a ship made of water at your opponents is in there. It's also got the typical back-end progression and monetisation offerings that most of the others have. I'd say despite it's laziness some of the quality of life features make it worth a potential migration, or at least checking out.

Chess Rush

Developer: Tencent Games Platforms: iOS Universal, Android

Tencent being one of the 'big names' in Chinese videogame publishing, it makes sense that they'd try and push out their own version of Auto Chess - which makes the partnership with Drodo over OG Auto Chess a bit odd. Come to think of it, Imba are also partnered with Drodo, and they've got their own game on this list as well. The Auto Chess Wars are weird. Anyway, Chess Rush might as well be a carbon copy clone of Auto Chess: Origins. It's got pretty much all the same features, and the heroes are very similar in a lot of respects apart from extra/different types and synergies. It's also got a slightly more in-your-face free-to-play economy in the sense that it keeps throwing free resources at you but it's largely harmless.

I'm recommending this one because it's a prettier looking alternative to Auto Chess: Origin - the production values are actually surprisingly good, with nice visuals, and a neat little intro into every match. I suspect Tencent have more resources to draw on than Drodo does so if you're looking for something that's likely iterate and polish at a decent rate, this might be an alternative. It's currently experimenting with a 4x4 mode, after having just introduced Co-op to the game, and is proving to be a bit quicker in terms of pushing out iterations and new ideas.

Arena of Evolutions: Red Tides

Developer: HERO Game Platforms: iOS Universal, Android

Now this is what we're talking about. A grittier, more sci-fi take on the Auto Chess formula. With some moody splash artwork and even a full-fledged opening movie to boot, our first thought when firing up this game was just how quickly the company must have got the ball rolling when Dota Auto Chess originally broke onto the scene.

Everything about Arena of Evolution: Red Tides screams respectable production value. If you're trying to avoid being called out as a clone, this is the way to do it. The units don't always match the space war vibe the opening movie sets up (thank you, kung-fu panda), but there's a nice variety of unique characters to pick up and play with.  If you're not into multiplayer, AI brawls will still give anyone but the pros a decent (and welcoming) challenge. If you're looking for a more mature Auto Chess experience, this is a solid recommendation over the official counterpart. Everything from the chess board – which is less a board and more a stone battlefield – to the crude iron fence separating the brawl from your bench screams quality in the face of what comes next.

 Auto Chess Legends

Developer: Imba/Suga Platforms: iOS Universal, Android

This one was down for maintenance when we first tried to test it out. It wasn't a good look, and we honestly thought the game was just dead on arrival… Turned out we were wrong! It fired up without a hitch the next day and was a pleasant surprise. There's a clean UI and most of the of the details you'd come to expect from a game of Auto Chess, but without an AI mode after the initial tutorial, it might scare off newcomers looking to practice before diving into the real thing. It's a little sparse of the extra game modes, but at least the developers found the time to offer micro-transaction goodies, right?

While it starts off looking like one of those cheap mobile ads on a dodgy website, Auto Chess Legends is one of the better made alternatives out there. Nowhere near the same level of depth and detail of the above games, but enough to avoid the bucket list below.

Ones To Avoid

We're not going to call out the lack of direct competition on the app stores right now. After all, Auto Chess isn't even a year old. But what we will call out are deplorable cash grabs siphoning the Auto Chess name and bewildering any curious mind that dares search for the next big thing. These games aren't vying for your time at all – just your money. They function mostly the same as any other Auto Battler game would, albeit for once little thing – they're all pay to win. Avoid these unless you're looking for the quick and easy route to learn the fundamentals of the game.

Heroes Auto Chess

Developer: Tap2Play LLC Platforms: iOS/Android

The first of the lot we tested out, Heroes Auto Chess is one of the better efforts of the bunch – but it's still pretty gnarly. Its low-poly art-style is reminiscent of old Steam shovelware riding the 'voxel' hype train. Hop into a match, however, and the quality starts to rapidly deteriorate further. It's a very basic take on Auto Chess, with no notable polish. Units lack personality as they're absolutely mute, while battles are nothing more than a slight wiggle animation with a cheap stock sword clash sound playing out every second or two.

Then comes the worst part – you can forgo any need for actual strategy by watching an ad to re-roll and buy additional units in the shop. Not cool. With only three slots on the bench, there's very little actually strategy to be had here, anyway. Without the ads, we could let Heroes Auto Chess slide as a decent way to introduce the game to a far younger audience. Accept donations or charge for skins by all means, but don't nullify the whole point of your game just to make 1c on an ad click. You're better than that.

AutoChess War

Developer: Phoenix Mobile/Chengdu Phoenix Electronic Arts Co. Limited Platforms: iOS/Android

We wanted to like this one, but it flops out of the gate a little too soon. AutoChess War looked promising – and actually could be if development keeps up – but what little it does is quickly soured yet again by in-game ads. A unique Adventure mode is a nice little touch. It doesn't really add much to the Auto Chess formula (aside from the horizontal board), but it does separate the game into bite-sized rounds you can drop in and out of at will, making the game more commute-friendly. When you're at home, the Endless Challenge mode can be a good way to test out some strategies. But you'll need to play another game entirely to actually execute them against another player. 

Auto Chess Defense

Developer: Phoenix Mobile/Chengdu Phoenix Electronic Arts Co. Limited Platforms: iOS/Android

The first thing I noticed is that this one calls itself Auto Chess Mobile in game. Looks like someone paid for a logo a little too soon. Diving deeper, Auto Chess Defense (Mobile?) feels like a game you would have found on the original iPhone. The first app of its kind. While that would have been a glowing recommendation back in 2007, it's the worst kind of criticism you can have in 2019. We appreciate the option to skip straight into battle rather than waiting on a laborious timer, but, again, the ads creep in the sour the experience.

Seen any other games worthy of people's attention, or ones they should definitely avoid? Let us know in the comments!

The Best (And Worst) Auto Chess Games on Android and iOS published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/

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7 QUICK WAYS TO CUSTOMIZE YOUR WEDDING VENUE

In case you're an occasion organizer working with a particular association or brand with a committed mission, it can be exceptionally viable to discover approaches to interface your occasion scene to the objectives of your association. In any case, how would you do it and guarantee it doesn't influence what your past participants have generally expected from you? You do it with a little imagination and these different tips.

Why Banquet halls in Mumbai Selection Is So Important

Your scene choice can do a few things:

Sets the tone for your occasion

Pulls in participants

Reminds individuals who your association is and what it is endeavoring to do

This last activity is imperative for associations with a restricted spending plan, for example, philanthropies or foundations. A well-thoroughly considered scene can help participants to remember your main goal and allure them to get behind it; while an inadequately chose one may make individuals think you needn't bother with the cash all things considered.

Step by step instructions to Connect Your Mission to Your Event Venue

Personalization is a noteworthy popular expression around occasions nowadays. Most occasion organizers are taking a gander at routes in which to utilize information and movement history to customize everything from speaker choices to learning results, to nourishment.

So why are despite everything we utilizing accessibility and cost to choose the scenes? Try not to misjudge, these things are vital and you can't book the setting without it being accessible or inside your financial plan, but at the same time it's a smart thought that you select a scene that mirrors your authoritative mission as well. For example, an ecological gathering could never choose a goal or scene that didn't coordinate its accepted procedures for being green.

Ventures to Selecting a Personalized Venue

You don't need to be a natural gathering to profit by securing a scene that matches your association's main goal. You simply need to take after these recommendations:

Choose how your central goal identifies with occasion scenes. For example, would you say you are an outside climbing association? At that point why have your occasion inside?

Think outside about the standard.

A scene can be anyplace that they'll give you a chance to collect a gathering of individuals on the off chance that you have the cash to fit the area for what it needs. For a flying creature watcher's gathering, a knoll might be to a great degree fitting. Try not to confine yourself at first with imagining that your setting needs four dividers. Consider how your participants would portray your association and afterward endeavor to discover a setting that fits that depiction.

Make a short rundown of conceivable areas and visit them.

Do they feel like your association? Would you be able to see yourself there? This is a similar procedure you take when strolling through a house you're considering purchasing.

Consider your participant statistic.

Is it true that they are around the local area or will they travel and require overnight settlement? This is something you'll need to consider before booking a setting way strange. Fields are pleasant however in the event that they require spots to remain it's imperative you comprehend whether your participant is the outdoors, glamping, or inn sort.

Ask yourself whether this space addresses your issues and objectives.

The cool factor is vital however it can't be missing one of your fundamental needs, nor should it be creative to the point that is makes it troublesome for you to accomplish your objectives. On the off chance that you will likely raise cash, you would prefer not to give your pitch at a whitewater boating occasion, for example, since individuals will abandon wallets.

Work with a unique setting locator.

There are a couple of organizations in expansive urban communities that will enable you to locate the ideal setting for your association. They can enable you to discover only the kind of non-conventional spaces you may be searching for. Here are some more tips and strange approaches to find the ideal setting.

Tie your scene into your central goal by featuring it somehow.

On the off chance that your occasion is a gathering pledges one, for instance, figure out how to tie your setting into what you're raising assets for. You can likewise utilize it for instance. Envision your occasion is raising assets to spare an old church. Choosing a noteworthy setting that was spared from decimation by an association like yours can enable individuals to see the likelihood of what you're requesting.

A Few Things to Keep in Mind with Non-Traditional Venue Selection

Non-conventional settings can make a wonderful showing with regards to mirroring your association's central goal yet there are a couple of things to remember before choosing one:

Comprehend what you don't have the foggiest idea. When you select a non-conventional space for your occasion, there are things you'll have to consider that you wouldn't need to on the off chance that you booked the nearby dance hall. On the off chance that it is a dry-employ scene or non-reason assembled you will no doubt need to get your own tables, seats, cloths, sustenance, utensils, innovation, and so on.

Ensure you approach power. Fields are flawless however there are a considerable measure of familiar luxuries that should be tended to in those circumstances.

Have they facilitated an occasion some time recently? It's not basic but rather helps since non-customary spaces request somewhat more of a hands-on approach and are less turnkey.

As said over, it's critical to know whether your participants will be nearby or from away. In the event that they'll be heading out to go to, you'll require settlement. In any case, you'll require stopping so discover what your alternatives are on these things previously reserving.

You don't generally require a non-customary space for your scene for it to feel customized and in-accordance with your association. Now and again all it requires is changing the investment for your occasion. For example, in case you're an association of winged creature watchers that dependably has a night gathering in a dance hall, changing it to the exhibition hall gardens amid the day can inhale new life into it and consider charming discussion about the feathered creatures who are likewise in participation.

In Conclusion

The setting is a critical piece of your occasion. It drives participants and sets a topic. However most occasion organizers utilize spending plan and accessibility to shape this essential choice. Rather, search for scenes that fit your association. Customizing your setting hunt and determination to mirror your central goal can establish a major connection on your gathering of people.

Customized Video with the assistance of wedding vendor

Love relational unions in an Indian family unit are no not as much as any Bollywood dramatizations. You go over the ideal individual, get to know each other, experience passionate feelings for, choose to get the chance to get hitched, break the news to the two close families. What's more, get talked into running a foundation check on each other's universe.

And furthermore persuade the prompt two families, break the news to the relatives, answer a great deal of their inquiries, persuade the relatives and after that at last with a considerable measure of other dramatization streaming all through the entire situation – you get to the real wedding service. Depleting, yes, yet completely pleasant and absolutely justified, despite all the trouble.

We, at wedding vendor in Mumbai, comprehend your need to abide in all that dramatization. Where you get the chance to be at the focal point of the tempest and deal with things at your own sweet pace. It is adequate to appreciate these good and bad times. No Indian wedding is rendered finished without a couple of confusions all over.

Furthermore, in the meantime, you are left with a favor wedding story to think back to. It is hard to provide food for every one of the plans at the same time, with such a great amount of occurring out of sight. In this manner, wedding vendor in Mumbai causes you deal with a gigantic lump of your wedding function arrangements, the visitors.

With all the chirpy disarray rotating around the wedding service arrangements – where you need to shop, book scenes, deal with the workplace work, sort the coordination, set up a list if people to attend and welcome every single one of them by and by.

There unquestionably is a ton on your plate to care for. wedding vendor in mumbai lessens your work stack by giving you a stage to convey advanced solicitations to every one of your visitors. It is hard to keep a track whether all the printed solicitations have been securely conveyed crosswise over to your visitors. Furthermore, regardless of whether they will have the capacity to make it for you festivities.

Record a fantastic video welcome utilizing any motion picture creator application, where you can get inventive with pictures and individual recordings. You can utilize the application to join together numerous clasps and give your visitors a knowledge on your existence with your life partner to-be up until this point.

You can make utilization of the different films creator application elements and play around with some excellent music to lift up the spirits of every one of those you welcome. The individual message will just add a delightful touch to the entire idea.

[easyfoodnetwork]

Peaches Hot House’s fried chicken packaged to-go 15 gallons of cocktails. 180 ramekins of aioli. How one Brooklyn hotspot has turned itself into a successful fast-casual restaurant during the pandemic Before the pandemic, eating dinner at Brooklyn restaurant Peaches Hot House meant writing a name on a whiteboard in the vestibule and waiting to be called for a table in a packed dining room. The staff would point guests to the bar while they waited, and despite the fact that it takes up about a third of the room, it was almost as difficult to snag a seat there as it was at a table. Today the seatless bar has a few menus strewn across it, the whiteboard reads “takeout and delivery,” and the furniture is stacked to one side of the dining room. A bench that used to provide seating for four people now serves as a barrier between the six-foot square of masking tape on the floor — the designated ordering zone — and the bar and kitchen. But despite of all of this, Peaches Hot House is busier than ever. On Thursday, July 2, the day’s sales are 64 percent higher than they were a year ago around this time. “Even if it’s a busy night, you can only seat so many people,” says Damian Laverty-McDowell, the company chef for B + C Restaurants, the group that owns Peaches Hot House. Since the pandemic began, B + C added Grubhub and Door Dash delivery services on top of its existing relationship with Caviar. “There was a finite ceiling. When you add three new delivery service revenue streams, and you compound that by the fact that nobody can go out to eat, it flips all that right on its head. Now it is infinite.” “Triple-batch everything.” As the pandemic took hold, restaurateurs scrambled to figure out how to adapt their businesses to an industry that was being dealt unprecedented changes on a daily basis. “At that point, we didn’t know how many people we were going to be able to keep on,” Craig Samuel, one of the owners, says. “We didn’t know if [a Payment Protection Program loan] was going to be available, or if it was going to be available to us.” The owners of B + C devised a plan to furlough the majority of their staff, temporarily closing the other Hot House location, in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood, and funneling business and the remaining employees to the location in Bed-Stuy. “It was a decision that was made based on trying to remain a viable business,” Samuel says. “When [New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio] said that delivery and takeout were still available, we figured we’d be able to make it at at least some of the locations with that.” The plan worked, but required restructuring Hot House into a fast-casual version of itself. The transformation is evident from before the restaurant opens at 11 on July 2. Norma Hunt, the restaurant’s operations manager, tells the staff to scale up their side work of portioning barbecue aioli and pre-batching cocktails. “Triple-batch everything,” she instructs. “So the work flow isn’t so bad tomorrow.” Claudia, a bartender who has worked at the restaurant for a week, mixes the restaurant’s four cocktails in buckets usually used to ship and store pickles. By the time the gate is rolled up, she has mixed 15 gallons of tequila, fresh watermelon, and lime juices, which will go into the frozen drink machine and become the Back Up Dancer cocktail. The Peaches Hot House beverage program has always focused on cocktails, according to Hunt, but since the shift to delivery and takeout, it has been streamlined to essentials: three drinks, bottled in three sizes, plus the Back Up Dancer (which is only available for pickup because it doesn’t travel well). Staff who used to wait tables, now help package delivery and takeout orders. The food has been pared down to the most resilient essentials. The updated menu, which Hot House has been serving since April, is two-thirds the size of the one before the pandemic. “I looked at all the numbers of what we were selling through each platform, and we narrowed down what people were actually eating,” Laverty-McDowell says. The burger and grilled broccoli are now the only items cooked to order. Everything else is made in larger quantities, with tweaks like replacing sauteed kale with braised collard greens, which can stay warm in a steam table without falling apart. The restaurant’s best-sellers, its Nashville-style hot chicken plate and fried chicken sandwich, are still there, and it sells a lot more of them. The front-of-house staff, who used to ping-pong across the floor during service, are much more stationary now. Christina, who worked as a server and bartender at Hot House before the pandemic, spends the morning working the expediter position in the kitchen. When guests sat at tables in the dining room, an expediter worked with cooks to ensure that food coming off the line made it to tables at the right pace, tidying plates and occasionally running them out to the dining room. Today, her shift mostly consists of packing food into paper bags, bringing them out to what used to be the service bar, and stocking up for the dinner rush. As she fills sleeves of to-go ramekins of barbecue aioli, she tells me how she has used her new position wrangling nearly 100 orders at a time as a means to also work on a personal goal that she set after being furloughed. “When I got let go, I was like, okay, I’m going to take this time to see if I can try to make myself better,” she explains. She says coming back to work the expo station has instead forced her to be more comfortable asking for help, which she didn’t ever do while working behind the bar in the old days. The new work has also resulted in physical changes: “I definitely dropped 20 pounds since coming back to work,” she says. “I used to struggle with one of [the cocktail] buckets; now I can hold two with no issues.” But she misses her old job and likens her new one to working in fast food, before adding that here at least she still gets to talk to guests when they pick up their orders. After 15 minutes, she has filled one fish tub full of about 60 ramekins. She needs to fill three more before the dinner crew gets in, but first she places an order of fried green tomatoes and a shrimp sandwich into a bag, staples the ticket to the front, and brings it to the dining room. The lion’s share of Hot House’s orders come from delivery apps, and the combined sales from all three services — Grubhub, Door Dash, and Caviar — are 12 times what the restaurant sold on delivery apps on the Thursday before the Fourth of July in 2019. Each app operates from its own tablet and interface, and prints its own order tickets (all of which look different from the tickets the restaurant’s point-of-sale system prints out for orders). Hunt notes that while the transition from table service to takeout has required adjustment for the staff, she has also noticed the impact on regulars, who have called the restaurant feeling frazzled after trying to order delivery from apps. “On day two [of the city on pause], I was helping someone set up an account,” Hunt says. “I’ve also been emotional support — I’ll stay on the phone while they place the order and confirm that they got it.” Because 80 percent of the staff were laid off at the start of the pandemic, Hunt frequently worked as the only front-of-house employee while also ordering all the food, alcohol, and to-go boxes, as well as writing the schedule. The restaurant received a Paycheck Protection Program loan, allowing it to start to rehire employees in mid-May, and providing Hunt some reprieve from 70-hour work weeks. As lunch dies down past 3 p.m., the dinner cooks, Ruben and Antonio, arrive. Chicken fries from before the restaurant opens at noon until just shy of 9 p.m., and hotel pans of cornbread laid out to cool on kitchen shelves are replaced with bundt cakes throughout the day. Yarel, who works the dinner expo shift, displays laser focus in organizing her station before the rush starts. It doesn’t take long for the printers to start churning, filling the pass in front of her with tickets, and the bartop with bagged orders. Peaches Hot House is selling more fried chicken these days. On the sidewalk out front, couriers wait on electric bikes, glued to their phones. One, holding the collar of his shirt over his mouth, walks past the sign on the door asking everyone to wear a mask. He is one of 26 people who come in flagrantly disregarding the sign that day. After a handful of confrontations with guests and couriers over mask use, Hunt approaches each instance on a case-by-case basis. “I try to figure out the safest way to handle a situation so that I’m not putting any of my staff at risk,” she says. For some regulars, that means ribbing them into wearing one. For others, it can mean simply trying to get them out as quickly as possible, or offering them disposable masks. “I acknowledge the privilege in access to PPE,” Hunt says, “and this neighborhood has a dramatic schism there.” Hot House’s role as a neighborhood mainstay has worked to its benefit, according to Samuel. With the pandemic disrupting professional and personal routines, the residents of Bed-Stuy found themselves at home, not taking Ubers or dining out. Many sought to soothe themselves with comfort food from a neighborhood staple. The murder of George Floyd and ensuing civil unrest also contributed to an uptick in business. “We definitely had a huge bump because of it,” he says. “We were on everyone’s list of Black-owned businesses in Brooklyn.” Much of Hunt’s night is spent bouncing between greeting regulars and answering questions about the menu. This isn’t unlike her role in the pre-pandemic days, except now she is also making sure the space doesn’t become overcrowded. She occasionally clears the room, raising her voice and asking everyone who isn’t placing an order to please wait outside. Toward the end of the night, a man with a 5-month-old parrot on his shoulder yells an order for fried chicken and fried catfish through the open door. The parrot’s name is Leila, and her owner goes by Hot Sauce Mike. Neither entree is for the bird, who mostly eats seeds, but enjoys sugar as a treat. “The way that everything had shifted actually ended up benefiting us.” By Hunt’s assessment, it was a moderately busy service, but much more tranquil than some of the days she has worked in the past few months. Samuel is quick to point out that the boost in sales notwithstanding, Hot House is far from financial security. The increase in business is offset by delivery fees from apps, extra paper goods to facilitate serving all orders to go, and other increases in the cost of doing business that the restaurant has absorbed without raising prices. It also contends with struggles the industry has faced since before the pandemic, like rent hikes and increased labor costs. In mid-July, Hot House added tables in front of the restaurant and started full-service outdoor dining, offering the closest thing it can to the pre-pandemic experience (as well as an extra revenue stream). Still, Samuel says that delivery orders are sustaining the business, and having weathered the first few months of the pandemic likely bodes well for the future of Hot House. The worst is almost certainly behind Samuel. As the city and state governments were ramping up to ban indoor dining in mid-March, and he and his partners were trying to decide how to navigate the situation, he was also sick with COVID-19. His condition rapidly worsened, putting him in the hospital. “The next thing I know, I’m in a coma. I woke up, and found out that 25,000 people died. I was in a hospital without my phone, without contact, and [I] couldn’t call anyone. I was lying there thinking we’re dead. My career is over,” he says. “Later, I got in contact with my wife and talked to my partner. I realized that the way that everything had shifted actually ended up benefiting us.” Ian Browning is a writer, skateboarder, and occasional bartender based in New York City. Clay Williams is a Brooklyn-based photographer. from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2Q2u2nr

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