Just over a year ago, in December of 2012, a game launched for the iPad that you might not be familiar with, but you should be. It’s called Cook, Serve, Delicious! ($1.99) from developer David Galindo. Now, I’m not typically a fan of restaurant simulation type of games, but I decided to give Cook, Serve, Delicious! a spin when it came out and I was instantly hooked. It’s a surprisingly deep simulation, as you take your lowly one-star restaurant and build it up with new equipment and menu items on your way to making it a five-star fine dining establishment. The food-making mini-games are all fun, and the game quickly gets hectic as you try to keep up with a rush of orders without screwing anything up. We loved Cook, Serve, Delicious! in our original review, and since release the game has been fleshed out even further with content updates.

However, being an iPad-only game meant that Cook, Serve, Delicious! wasn’t reaching the entire (massive) audience of iOS device owners that it could be. While the game was originally released on the PC just a few months prior to the iPad, that version was similarly unknown, which meant that a whole lot of people were missing out on an excellent game. However, last October, Cook, Serve, Delicious! managed to get Greenlit on Steam, and since then the game has exploded in popularity. There’s a very interesting writeup by Galindo of that experience over on Gamasutra, if you want to read more about it. Anyway, the influx in popularity as well as the influx of additional income meant that Galindo could finally release an iPhone version of Cook, Serve, Delicious!, something that was originally planned for early last year. Better late than never, Cook, Serve, Delicious! Mobile (Free) is now available. Here’s a trailer for the iPad version so you can get an idea of what the game is like in motion.

My first worry when thinking about playing a game like Cook, Serve, Delicious! on an iPhone is that the screen is going to be much too cramped to adequately pull off all of the frantic mini-games. Well, it certainly is small, but it works surprisingly well. The text can be pretty tiny at times, but again, it’s manageable. I still think I prefer playing on the larger screen of the iPad, but it’s nice to have a version on my iPhone which is with me at all times. You never know when you’ll suddenly get the urge to cook a bunch of digital food, you know?

All that really matters is that this wonderful game is finally getting the exposure and attention it deserves. Whether on the iPhone, iPad, PC, Steam or even the Mac App Store, you need to be checking out Cook, Serve, Delicious! in some form. The new iPhone version drops the separate lite version approach of the iPad game and instead is offered as a free download with a one-time IAP of $2.99 to unlock the full game. No further IAP shenanigans or anything like that, just solid time-management restaurant simulation gameplay. Do yourself a favor and check out any or all versions of Cook, Serve, Delicious!, and watch your free time go up in flames.