If you have ever ended a shift at Bancho Sushi with a painful pile of leftover servings, you already know the real “boss fight” in Dave the Diver is inventory control. The single most useful number for planning your menu is your Cooksta rank customer cap, because that cap effectively tells you the maximum number of individual servings you can sell on a standard full service night, assuming your staff is fast enough to keep up.
Below is a rank by rank breakdown of the max customers, plus practical advice for translating those numbers into the right amount of food to put on the menu so you sell out cleanly instead of wasting ingredients.
What “Max Customers” Actually Means in Dave the Diver
Cooksta rank increases the restaurant’s maximum customers for the night, which is your upper limit of possible orders. The Cooksta table lists this explicitly as “Max Customers.”
Two important nuances:
First, the cap is not a promise. If your service is slow, customers can leave unhappy before they are served, and you can end up selling fewer servings than the cap even if you stocked enough food. Players regularly point out that staff quality and speed affect whether you actually reach the ceiling.
Second, “dishes” in planning terms really means servings. A single recipe can produce multiple servings, and each serving can satisfy one customer. The game’s recipe system makes this clear: recipes have a “Dish” value indicating how many servings a set of ingredients yields.
So when you plan, you are matching:
Max Customers (cap) = Total Servings placed on the menu
Max Customers by Cooksta Rank
Here are the customer caps per rank as listed in the Cooksta rank table:
- Coal: 10
- Bronze: 15
- Silver: 21
- Gold: 28
- Platinum: 36
- Diamond: 45
A separate community breakdown matches the same core progression for the main ranks (Bronze through Diamond) and is useful as a cross check.
How Many Dishes to Prepare at Each Cooksta Rank
Use the caps above as your baseline. If you want to avoid waste, the cleanest approach is to set up your menu so the total servings available equals the cap.
In other words:
- Coal: prep 10 servings
- Bronze: prep 15 servings
- Silver: prep 21 servings
- Gold: prep 28 servings
- Platinum: prep 36 servings
- Diamond: prep 45 servings
That is the “ideal spreadsheet answer.” In real play, you will usually make small adjustments depending on your menu type and staffing.
The Two Menu Styles That Change Everything
There are basically two ways most players run Bancho Sushi, and the right prep strategy depends on which one you are using.
Single serving sushi with Auto Supply
If your menu is mostly basic sushi that produces one serving per ingredient unit, the simplest low stress method is to put a small amount on the menu and enable Auto Supply. This keeps you from overcommitting rare ingredients and reduces micromanagement. Players often recommend this specifically for simple sushi items.
The tradeoff is that Auto Supply can still create waste if you are using ingredients you meant to conserve, and it does not solve the “multi serving recipe” problem below.
Multi serving recipes where prep math matters
Once you start leaning into recipes that produce 5, 7, 9, or 10 servings per craft, precision becomes valuable. If you over-prep a 9 serving dish, you can easily end the night with 4 to 8 servings left, and that can represent a lot of wasted materials depending on the recipe.
This is why the Cooksta caps matter so much. At Platinum, for example, a player described building a menu whose servings add up exactly to the 36 customer cap, effectively forcing a sellout without leftovers.
Practical Prep Examples You Can Copy
If you want a repeatable system, aim for 3 to 6 menu items whose servings add up to the cap. You can do it with any combination, as long as you hit the number.
Here are examples using the two most common caps people struggle with:
Platinum example: target 36 total servings
You can do something like:
- 9 servings dish
- 9 servings dish
- 7 servings dish
- 6 servings dish
- 5 servings dish
That totals 36 servings. The exact dishes do not matter as much as the serving counts and your ability to restock the ingredients consistently.
Diamond example: target 45 total servings
You can build 45 with combinations like:
- 10 + 10 + 9 + 8 + 8 = 45
- 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 = 45 (very clean if you have a reliable 9 serving “workhorse” recipe)
- 12 + 10 + 9 + 7 + 7 = 45 (if you have a higher yield dish you love)
The point is to stop thinking in “one dish” terms and start thinking in a “servings budget” that matches your Cooksta cap.
Night Diving: Why Your Sellout Number Can Drop
If you do a night dive, you are giving up a chunk of restaurant time, which can reduce how many customers you can serve that night even if you are stocked and staffed. Community testing often describes night dive nights as roughly a two thirds service window, leading to fewer customers served compared to a full restaurant night.
A practical way to plan for this is:
- Start with your rank cap
- Expect a meaningful reduction on night dive nights
- Stock a smaller servings budget so you do not over-prep multi serving dishes
If you want to be conservative and hate waste, treat night dive nights as “prep light” nights and save your big multi serving crafts for full service evenings.
Staffing and Throughput: Hitting the Cap Consistently
Even if you prep exactly 28 servings at Gold, you only sell 28 if your restaurant can physically serve them in time. Players note that with stronger staff you see the full customer count more consistently, while slower staff can lead to fewer total customers served.
If you are regularly ending below your cap with no leftovers, that is a service speed problem, not a menu math problem. In that situation, the fix is usually to:
- Upgrade and train staff that directly impacts serving speed and table turnover
- Help out as Dave during peak moments (clearing tables, delivering, refilling wasabi) so the line never stalls
- Simplify the menu to fewer items so you spend less time pausing to adjust stock mid shift
Once your throughput is stable, matching servings to the cap becomes extremely reliable, and your profits get more predictable.
Quick Reference: Customer Caps You Should Memorize
Coal 10, Bronze 15, Silver 21, Gold 28, Platinum 36, Diamond 45.
When you plan your menu like a servings budget instead of guessing, Cooksta ranks stop feeling scary, and you start ranking up with confidence because you know exactly what “enough food” looks like for the next tier.