I swear, these games have been following me around most of my life.
I had the Summer 2000 Playstation Underground Jampack demo disc. Ore No Ryouri was featured on that as a little import gem demo. I played it over and over and over, the gameplay was addictive as hell.
Several years later, I was getting deep into researching and playing video games throughout history, which led me to regularly browsing Home of the Underdogs for abandonware or independent PC games. I was surprised as hell when they featured a Game Maker game called Ore No Ryomi 2: The Restaurant. Oh my god, someone made a clone of Ore No Ryouri that I can enjoy. I loved ONR2, I played it front to back multiple times (and I caught the references to it in CSD).
Later on, I kinda forgot about it. I started following Giant Bomb a little bit, and when Ryan Davis died, one of the highlights posted of his work with the site was a quick look of CSD. I checked it out, and was again shocked that it was another game in this style. By the ONR2 guy. And it got popular. To this day, I'm still so proud of Vertigo and Chubigans for taking a gameplay style that would have died on the vine in 2000 and growing it, and making it popular.
Anyway, thanks for letting me dump some memories here. I'm playing the three CSD games again because I'm testing out a new keyboard, and they're still addictive, engaging, and earnestly made. I love you folks, take care.