How to hire staff and run the sushi restaurant of your dreams in Dave the Diver

 A woman with glasses scowls
A woman with glasses scowls

Recruiting the best staff in Dave the Diver is vital to free up some of your time and to help you run a successful business. When you're not busy shooting fish with a harpoon and carrying out research, you're tasked with helping run a sushi restaurant—what labour laws, am I right? In the beginning, you'll be the lead (and only) waiter in the restaurant, pouring green tea, tidying up, and bringing tasty fishy delights to customers. Once you've completed a few quests, however, you'll be able to unlock advertising and can start recruiting newer—and often better—staff to help cook, clean and serve customers. Some are better than others, though, and you'll want to invest in your staff to get the best from them, so here's how to recruit the best staff.

How to recruit staff in Dave the Diver

Before you can recruit staff, you'll need to wait for the Not Enough Workers quest to unlock in Chapter 1, then complete a specific quest for Yoshie, namely, fetching a shark's head. Easy work, then. To catch a Whitetip Reef Shark, look at your little radar and head to the right side of the swimmable area and stay in the semi-shallow waters. Eventually, one will approach you, and you'll want to make sure you have upgraded your gun and have enough rounds to knock it out.

Once you've collected the shark's head, you'll need to cook it with olive oil. Olive oil is the reward you'll get by completing the first quest in Tracking the Sea People, so it should be in your inventory already. Head back to the restaurant to research your fancy new dish from the Research tab, which you'll need to spend three Artisan's Flames on. After that, cook it up for Yoshie and you'll then be able to search for and recruit workers.

How to hire and train staff

Image 1 of 4

The menu screen depicting a shark head dish
The menu screen depicting a shark head dish

Image 2 of 4

A woman surrounded by hearts, seemingly very happy
A woman surrounded by hearts, seemingly very happy

Image 3 of 4

The menu for hiring new staff
The menu for hiring new staff

Image 4 of 4

How to send out a flyer ad for staff
How to send out a flyer ad for staff

When choosing staff, you'll want to consider the different skills available. Someone with Cooking++ will obviously be a better chef, whereas a Drink Serving Master will be firing out green teas at an alarming rate. Platinum and Gold tier staff are the best and worth investing in, but some Silver tier employees come with great skills, too.

You'll need to assign staff to an area, such as waiting tables or helping in the kitchen, and train them to help them reach their potential, which is their level 20 stats. Once trained, you can unlock additional skills and can level them up by spending some coin.

Employees have four traits: Cooking, serving, procure and appeal. Having a good balance across the board is best in the early game, but you'll want to recruit high-tier staff with specific traits, like Il Nino with his super high serving skill. There's no point putting someone with a cooking skill in the waiting room, so pay attention to the numbers.

Procurement and appeal influence your income and the restaurant's rating, so it's good to have staff with decent cooking and serving skills but high procurement and appeal in the waiting room to get better tips and reviews. It's worth noting that you'll want to save your cash for only the best staff training as it can get very expensive quickly.

Best staff

The hire staff screen
The hire staff screen

While you're free to choose whoever you want to hire, there are a few names to watch out for that will make a massive difference to your income and Cooksta rating. Here are the staff you'll definitely want to hire as early as possible and invest in their training.