Guests place their orders at U & Me Revolving Hot Pot.
Photos by Roberto Gonzalez
In recent years, the restaurant industry has undergone a significant transformation, embracing cutting-edge technologies to enhance efficiency and improve customer experience while simultaneously cutting the need for more human staff. Because humans need health care and positive feedback, and technology just needs you to press its sexy buttons.
It’s something that was accelerated by the pandemic when dining rooms were closed to the public and restaurateurs were fighting for a way to keep their kitchens open. Automated machinery is now widely being used around the world to help streamline food preparation, cooking and even dishwashing processes because working smarter is more profitable than working harder. But some ideas have more staying power than others.
When the Mongolorian first opened in Orlando’s Mills 50 neighborhood, it was one of the first local restaurants to try to incorporate “robot chefs” into its business model. The Star Wars-inspired Mongolian BBQ restaurant used a special model of tabletop gas stir friers that worked on timers and required the cooks to simply drop in the ingredients at specific times during the cooking process. The machines would stir themselves and then dump out the dish at the programmed/ordained time, with their human helpers focusing on more intricate and creative steps like the final presentation of the dish and packaging for to-go orders.
Those robots were ultimately abandoned in favor of human counterparts who could work their woks faster than their failed robot replacements, but the seed has been planted and a future where the robots win isn’t that far off. At least in the wokky road of restaurant work.
The restaurant’s robot dessert tray and conveyor belt deliver your meal.
Something that has yet to make its way to Orlando is the delivery robot movement. After our city’s recent failed foray into autonomous buses downtown (they kept crashing into the LYNX buses, so the city has hit the pause button to figure out some more robot science) it’s no surprise that trusting delivery robots to find their way on our janky sidewalks is something that’s not likely to happen in the near future. Heck, it’s hard enough for pedestrians to make it out there on Orlando streets, let alone a self-steering Rubbermaid on wheels. The use of expensive food delivery services in Central Florida like UberEats and GrubHub isn’t going away anytime soon, and one of the most expensive parts of that chain is the human delivery driver. If companies could crack the code for robots to make smaller trips in areas like downtown, they could drastically increase their profit margins.
Bartenders at places like the Wave Hotel’s BACAN restaurant in Lake Nona simply load the robot trays up with a group’s order, punch some buttons and it wheels its way over to its destination with a beep and a boop, and some Jennifer Coolidge-like cooing from the diners. Please note: BACAN is no longer using robot servers at this time.
It’s an idea that gained a foothold in the height of the pandemic when diners were too scared to take food directly from another person and were washing their home grocery delivery orders before putting them away in their pantries. It’s something that never quite took though. And thankfully we stopped having to look at soggy Life cereal boxes.
While humans are still holding the wheel on delivery services and waiters, some restaurants are incorporating robotic systems into their customer service operations. Automated kiosks for ordering and payment have become commonplace, allowing patrons to customize their orders and pay without ever having to interact with a fellow human. Plantees, a vegan burger concept from the folks at Team Market Group, functions on a labor-lite model where the entire front-of-house has been automated. Guests order using a kiosk, and then pick up their food from an alphabetized pick-up window, allowing the owners to operate with half of the staff that would normally be required, and without having to worry about security for any cash transactions. It’s all by card.
But there are some places like U & Me Revolving Hot Pot that have taken all these toys from the toybox. The Instagram-friendly concept on Apopka-Vineland has taken ancient hot pot traditions, thrown them in a paper bag with a dusting of technology and kawaii fairy dust, shook it up, and Shake and Baked a fun, modern homunculus that social media users just can’t stop talking about.
The entire front-of-house has been automated at Plantees, a vegan burger concept. Guests order from a kiosk and pick up their food from an alphabeticized window. All transactions are cashless. Photo ©Keizah Aponte
Proteins like chicken and cured meats are picked up buffet-style before heading to your table where a pot of your chosen broth is heating up at your table on a built-in heating element. A conveyor belt weaving its way around the ambulatory of all the booths carries add-ons and fancy fixings for your hot pot, including greens, Bok choy, noodles, and assorted veggies. You add your food to your broth and let it boil its way into your ideal creation.
After you finish stuffing your face with your special soup, you can order dessert from a cute little robot dessert tray by taking something from its built-in skeleton of serving trays. Simply take what you want, and it’ll be added to your bill. Or, if that makes you nervous, you can chat up the robot assistants to make sure everything is in order and remind yourself that people are still in charge.
It’s a brave new world out there and the nicer you are to your machine friends today, the nicer they’ll be in the future when they eventually take over and send us all to Mars.