Helpful?


For the purposes of percentage recovery, these tables will assume you have 500 stamina.

Dried Sandberries are the most cost-efficient food, but they're inconvenient to collect in bulk and take way too long to eat for an appreciable amount of Stamina. I'm going to ignore them when I refer to other foods as being "the most cost-efficient."

You cannot stack the Stamina regen buff. Only eat one at a time.

⁠⁠Fine Steamed Sandfish

This dish recovers more than any other food. From the foods accessible on any playthrough (not limited to marriage), it is the most cost-efficient food. However, the Fine Steamed Sandfish is a Stamina Regen food itself, which isn't as convenient as the instant-stamina foods, and Crucian Carp is not available until the later part of the game.

⁠⁠Elsie's Love Cake

If you are married to Elsie, you get access to Elsie's Love Cake. It is, by and far, the most cost-efficient stamina food, and instant-stamina which is the most convenient. Elsie can also make the Rare Quality variety, giving 90 stamina. When your marriage partner makes you food, it costs no resources.

⁠⁠Salted Fish

Easy fish, cheap spice.


⁠⁠Dried Sandacuda

A little less cost-efficient than Salted Fish, but half the number of fish needed for the same amount of stamina. You're likely to get Sandacudas when when fishing for Sand Carp so these recipes work well as a pair.


⁠⁠Steamed Sandfish

Slightly more cost-efficient than Salted Fish, but it is a Regen food (slower, longer recovery) and needs an extra farmable ingredient. If you got it, great.

Dried Sandberry

No need to stress extra stamina right now. Just make sure you're spending all the stamina you've got every day and you'll be okay. But it doesn't hurt to have a small stack of Dried Sandberries in case you want to finish off that rock/log, or reach a relic.

Don't want to fiddle with cooking and gathering materials? Here are just the food items you can purchase from a store to eat later. They are much less efficient cost-wise.

The Saloon doesn't really care what you dine on to determine your stamina. It's entirely a function of how much gold you spend.

So if you buy 10g worth of food, you'll recover 15 stamina. 1.5 efficiency.

You can eat up to 10 individual items on the menu. So you'd think the strategy is to eat the 10 most expensive individual items. But here's the rub, once you go over 20g, the total efficiency is lowered for every gold more.

20g worth of food, 30 stamina. Still 1.5 eff.
30g = 40 stamina. 1.33 eff.
382g = 184 stamina. 0.48 eff.

So even at the most efficient, 1.5 eff is lower than 7 other foods you can easily make, and you're not getting that much stamina out of it.

Of course, the day's Special will usually be heavily discounted. So maybe you can get a little bit of stamina back at a really nice efficiency. But it's still not really that much.

For example: My special today was something that normally costs 21g on sale for 6g. 31 stamina. 1.48 eff to 5.17.

Saloon Dine-In, Cost vs Stamina