German Restaurant Ditches Waiters, Sends Food To Diners On Metal Slide Rails
from the do-you-tip-the-rails? dept
We've definitely seen restaurants embrace technology and automation to bizarre ends before, but apparently a new restaurant in Germany is taking that to extremes. The Nuremberg-based 's Blaggers has completely replaced waiters with an automated system (via The Raw Feed). While there have certainly been fast food restaurants that have let patrons order themselves, in this case, it's a sit-down restaurant. Diners order their meals via a touchscreen, which is relayed to the kitchen which (and this turns out to be important) is upstairs from the dining area. Then, using a special hotpot that connects to a bunch of spiral steel rails your food is delivered by gravity power. The touchscreen actually keeps you up to date, as well, telling you how long it'll be until your food is delivered. The terminals also accept payment. Of course, the article doesn't explain how the cleanup process works... Perhaps diners can send the finished dishes down to a dishwasher in the basement? The guy behind it is hoping to license the offering to other restaurants (including McDonald's), but from the early reviews of his own restaurant, it sounds like people have been coming for the novelty, but some are a bit turned off by the mechanical nature of everything (and one person even compared it to the machinery used to feed pigs on large farms).
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Filed Under: automation, restaurants
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And if your food is too rare, etc.
How will a computer know when to ask "Is everything OK?" when you have a mouthful? Anyone else leery of ordering gravity-fed soup?
No worries on calculating a tip, either.
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Re: And if your food is too rare, etc.
The restraint also says it tends to replace waiters, but that says nothing for replacement of the busboys - which solves the clean-up issues.
If you click through to the links, you will find a couple of photos for the contraption.
Paying by CC or CASH shouldn't be a problem - heck, the automated check-outs at HomeDepo work mostly just fine... they even speak in two languages, English and Spanish!
But this leaves one to wonder what should happen if the computer at a table malfunctions or refuses to accept cash or give change - do they just close down the whole table with a sign saying "out of order"?
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Serves their needs
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Re: Serves their needs
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Re: Serves their needs
And yeah, Yo! Sushi (and probably some other sushi places that I haven't been to) use a little conveyor belt to bring your food to you. Although they do use waiters. But CONVEYOR BELT! It's the only reason I started eating sushi. The serving is awesome.
Also, in the fourth picture for the article, isn't that girl a little young to have a credit card?
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and the news is ?
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Heck, I have an idea!! Take it to the next level - just make your own food too!!
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How can he patent something in a movie
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Nothing New
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How about water power?
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waiters paid less
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Questions?
can I get extra cheese with that?
which is a best desert, I'm allegic to dairy?
etc.
Especially in the service industry a human beings ability to adapt to changing situations makes them much more capable than a computer.
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Re: Questions?
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Re: Jeanne the Waiter-Hater
Take your pick. The entire middle-class of restaurants caters to the middle-class of customer, and the majority of them enjoy "personal" and "friendly" interactive service.
It is part of the job of your wait-staff to offer this. Believe me, they don't want to be friends with you, either (particularly, YOU, Jeanne). If you don't like it, choose a different restaurant, or more pleasantly, stay at home and make your own d**n food.
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Like pig farms ?
Only on the very best farms do the pigs get to choose what they want to eat.
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Toy Train food delivery...
> Kansas City, Kansas, that delivers your meal to your table
> on a miniature train.
When I was growing up in New Rochelle, NY, in the mid-50's there was a little storefront diner called "Hamburger Depot" that did that. As a kid, I loved to go there just to watch the wrecks when the kitchen sent the train around the counter too fast.
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Re: Toy Train food delivery...
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WTF do customers do if they don't have train tracks near them? Doesn't that kind of screw up their yards?
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Sushi via boat/conveyer: pretty widespread.
Nope, not a new idea, but I do like the twist of ordering via terminal.
Here's a Yelp topic on the issue of sushi delivered via boat. Coincidentally, I went to Isobune in Oakland today. The novelty would probably wear off after a while, but it was fun.
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Oblig Futurama
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Funny anecdote
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German waiter alternative
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Re: Re: Questions?
> butt. Don't go to the restaurant if you don't like the way
> they offer the food. If you are allergic to milk, don't
> order it. Honestly. Stay home.
Wow, that's rather insensitive and extreme. So nobody should eat at restaurants if they have food allergies? Awesome. Are you the Soup Nazi by any chance?
Special orders are no big deal, for one thing. You could easily add a simple feature to ask a question or add special instructions to an order, something on the level of
1. hold down a button
2. ask question
3. release button
4. wait for response from someone
They could have one person back in the kitchen answering all these questions and offer uniformity and certainty. I don't know how many times I've heard a wait(er|ress) say "I'm not sure, let me go ask."
Alternatively, if they aren't automating meal delivery, they could simply have a button you can smack to get a waiter over to your table if you don't want to play ball.
I work in IVR (interactive voice response -- the technology behind the automated voice you talk to before your bank lets you talk to a customer service rep) and despite the perceived annoyance, it enables companies to service many more customers with fewer representatives, allowing them to pass the savings onto their consumers, and lower prices mean the customers are happy and the company will do better business.
Anyway, the latter solution would be similar to the current state of the IVR industry. If you have a problem the automated system can't handle, you just ask to talk to a person. Likewise, if you need to ask about the contents of a particularly frightening secret sauce, you could just tap an icon and get a wait(er|ress).
Besides, I for one would LOVE to be able to order without having to tell our server "we're still deciding" twice and then sitting around waiting for them to come back (the wait is longer with each "we don't know yet", it seems) so we can finally order. The least they could do is have a button to page a server, like the flight attendant page buttons on airplanes.
Incremental ordering would also be great. Instead of having to ask for everything in one go and hope you don't forget anything, you could just decide to tap that "chocolate shake" button at any point. That might be an unbearable temptation for dieters, but I'm sure the restaurants will LOVE that. ^^
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to start in india
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to start in india
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park attraction
In the resort of England, Attration Nr.483
http://resort.europapark.de/mb7326/Parkplan_Europa_Park2012.pdf
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