World's First Automated Restaurant Opens In Germany

[Flabbergasted]

World's First Automated Restaurant Opens In Germany
August 20, 2007 Font:

GOODBYE RUDE WAITERS

World's First Automated Restaurant Opens In Germany
A new restaurant in Nuremberg may be the first sit-down restaurant in the world that doesn't have waiters. They've been replaced with a fully automated ordering and table service system.

The latest revolution in the restaurant business isn't taking place in Paris or London or even Berlin for that matter. It's happening in an odd location -- a non-descript industrial building on the outskirts of Nuremberg in Bavaria. Michael Mack, who got his start operating a profitable iron foundry in the city, has reinvented the way guests are served food and drinks and infused the culinary world with a bit of the Jetsons.

Mack, a stranger to the business of dining, has opened the world's first restaurant to feature fully automated ordering and table service. At the bistro 's Baggers, the waiter of old has been shown the door. And in a country known for being a service wasteland (more...), it's uncertain he'll actually be missed. Instead of the classic, apron and tie-wearing waiter, each table has been connected by metal rails to the kitchen. Dishes like "organic beef in buttermilk" and "sausage en croute" glide along the rails to customers, propelled by gravity.

For the magic to work at all, Mack had to install the kitchen directly beneath the roof of the multistory restaurant. Customers order their meals using a touch-screen system that is placed at each table, and the entire restaurant is networked via a computer system. Customers' orders are registered upstairs in the kitchen and a computer in the cellar keeps track of supply stocks. The system also calculates the likely delivery times for drinks and meals at every table and keeps customers informed.

The setup is more reminiscent of a post office sorting room than a traditional restaurant, which might offend some gourmets. But Mack believes there is a global market for his new invention. His gravity feed rail system is patented in Germany and he is seeking protection for the invention internationally so that he can license it to restaurants abroad.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,501086,00.html

[SoCalDem]

1. My compliments to the chef

[porphyrian]

2. The Illuminati are eliminating wait staff! - n/t

[Bluebear]

3. Robot! There's a hair in my soup!

No thanks, I'll stay with a restaurant that employs people.

[zabet]

4. Anyone working in the kitchen can say..

it's all downhill from here, and mean it.

[dipsydoodle]

5. Sounds like Woody Allen in the kitchen in Sleeper

:rofl:

[MADem]

6. People like to be snotty to the waiter. And who cleans up the tables afterwards?

It'll be the busboy catching the shit, I guess....


I dunno--I can be ignored by machinery at HOME, for less money, too!!!

The bizarre mechanism certainly lures a large number of curious people to the drab, out of the way Nuremberg industrial park where it is located. Whether or not the guests will take to the restaurant, which opened earlier this month, is unclear. "We prefer a nice friendly waiter to this cold stainless steel system you can't talk to," one visitor complained recently in a posting on the Internet forum Restaurant-Kritik.de.

A comment from another observer demonstrates the automated service system can trigger other unsavory associations too: The spiraling rails remind her of the automated feeding system used to feed pigs on large farms.

[soothsayer]

7. An automat?