Fully Automated Restaurant Opens in Germany

Fully automated restaurant opens in Germany

By Conrad Quilty-Harper posted Aug 27th, 2007 at 5:02 AM0

Hate interacting with humans? Well then we've got the restaurant for you, located in Nuremberg, Germany. The restaurant, called Bagger's, eschews waiters and waitresses for gravity operated ramps that sends food directly to tables. Customers order on touch screens, swipe their cards on built in readers, and wait for their food with a read-out that shows when the food is expected to be delivered. So, get ready to yell at your ordinateur when your fries are late. "Garcon!" ain't gonna cut it in this restaurant. Automated restaurant From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Automated restaurant or robotic restaurant is a restaurant that uses robots to do tasks such as delivering food and drinks to the tables and/or to cook the food. Such a robots are hired to replace human labour (such as waiters and chefs).

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 1 Existing automated restaurants o 1.1 Fritz's Railroad Restaurant o 1.2 Výtopna (Railway Restaurant) o 1.3 's Baggers Restaurant o 1.4 FuA-Men Restaurant o 1.5 Hajime Robot Restaurant o 1.6 Dalu Robot Restaurant o 1.7 Haohai Robot Restaurant o 1.8 Robot Kitchen Restaurant o 1.9 Other restaurants o 1.10 Shawarma slicing robot  2 See also  3 References  4 External links Existing automated restaurants[edit source | editbeta]

Fritz's Railroad Restaurant[edit source | editbeta]

Fritz's Railroad Restaurant is a restaurant located in Kansas City, Missouri. Orders at the restaurant are called in from the booths on a telephone and delivered via an overhead rail system called "Skat Cat". A mechanical arm stops the orders at the platform above the tables, which then lowers to deliver the food. Actual humans bring the drinks.[1]

Výtopna (Railway Restaurant)[edit source | editbeta]

Výtopna is restaurant with model train service, where trainsets brings beverages to every customer table. Výtopna is a franchise of five restaurants and coffeehouses in larger cities of Czech Republic. One restaurant is in Prague and Orlová, another two are in Brno and one coffeehouse in Ostrava. Trademark is owned by Petr Fridrich.[2] 's Baggers Restaurant[edit source | editbeta]

's Baggers Restaurant is a restaurant located in Nuremberg, Germany. The restaurant features a metallic tracks that sends food and drinks directly to the tables. Customers order on touch screens, swipe their cards on built in readers, and wait for their food with a read-out that shows when the food is expected to be delivered.[3]

FuA-Men Restaurant[edit source | editbeta]

FuA-Men (Fully Automated raMen) Restaurant is a ramen restaurant located in Nagoya, Japan. The restaurant features a fully autonomous robotic chef and assistant chef. The robots perform all of the cooking tasks needed to make 80 bowls per day, serve the customers who come to the small restaurant and entertain in a stand-up comedy play during the customers’ dining experience. They also spin dishes and perform mock duels. The restaurant sells a regular noodle bowl with a pork broth-based soup which is made in about a minute and forty seconds. Although it has yet to make a profit, diners note that they cannot tell the difference in taste.[4]

Hajime Robot Restaurant[edit source | editbeta]

Hajime Robot Restauran is a Japanese restaurant located in Bangkok, Thailand. The restaurant features a samurai-shaped robots as a waiters that slide all the way to the customers table, bring the order, clean tables, and even do a dance routine to entertain guests. According to the owner of restaurant, the samurai robot waiters cost $930,000, but with the popularity this place is enjoying, he is sure to get his money back very soon.[5]

Dalu Robot Restaurant[edit source | editbeta]

Dalu Robot Restaurant is a restaurant located in Jinan, China. The restaurant features six custom built robot servers and two more feminine robots that greet customers as they enter. While people cook the food, the service bots deliver the meals by “riding” bicycles along a well marked track. The restaurant can currently serve about 100 customers at a time at 21 different tables. Shandong Dalu Science and Technology Company, which created the restaurant, has plans to expand to 40 machines.[6]

Haohai Robot Restaurant[edit source | editbeta]

Haohai Robot Restaurant is a restaurant located in Harbin, China. This restaurant has 18 robot waiters and cooks that have been designed and made by Haohai Robot Company Co., Ltd. Each robot costs around 200,000 yuan (about 32,000 US dollars) and their robotic serving powers are usually limited to one task. They can work for five hours continuously on a two-hour battery charge.[7]

Robot Kitchen Restaurant[edit source | editbeta]

Robot Kitchen is a restaurant located in Hong Kong, China. This restaurant features three robots, including a large robot that is equipped to take customer orders, transmit them to the kitchen, and deliver the meals to the customer's table. The restaurant also features Robonova-1, a robot that dances on the table tops and keeps the customers entertained.[8][9]

Other restaurants[edit source | editbeta]

Other robotic restaurants are located in Thailand and Japan.[10][11][12]

Shawarma slicing robot[edit source | editbeta]

Alkadur RobotSystems have designed "Doner-Robot", a shawarma slicing robot that is guided by an overhead camera. The robot is already installed in restaurants around the world.

Tek Temal, an electrical engineer from Sydney, have designed "Hyper Slicer, a shawarma slicing robot that uses pressure sensing to get the perfect number of slices from the circumference of the meat.[13] Automated restaurant From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Automated restaurant or robotic restaurant is a restaurant that uses robots to do tasks such as delivering food and drinks to the tables and/or to cook the food. Such a robots are hired to replace human labour (such as waiters and chefs).

Contents

[hide]

Fritz's Railroad Restaurant[edit source | editbeta]

Výtopna (Railway Restaurant)[edit source | editbeta]

's Baggers Restaurant[edit source | editbeta]

FuA-Men Restaurant[edit source | editbeta]

Hajime Robot Restaurant[edit source | editbeta]

Dalu Robot Restaurant[edit source | editbeta]

Haohai Robot Restaurant[edit source | editbeta]

Robot Kitchen Restaurant[edit source | editbeta]

Other restaurants[edit source | editbeta]

Other robotic restaurants are located in Thailand and Japan.[10][11][12]

Shawarma slicing robot[edit source | editbeta]

Alkadur RobotSystems have designed "Doner-Robot", a shawarma slicing robot that is guided by an overhead camera. The robot is already installed in restaurants around the world.

Tek Temal, an electrical engineer from Sydney, have designed "Hyper Slicer, a shawarma slicing robot that uses pressure sensing to get the perfect number of slices from the circumference of the meat.[13] 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, 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.

"Billions of euros in personnel costs could be saved using this system," Mack told SPIEGEL, saying he has no moral qualms with the job shedding effect it would have on the service sector if his invention ever caught on. "We don’t need service at the table."

Of course 's Baggers isn't the only place in the service industry where man is being replaced by machine. So-called hotelomats allow travelers to check-in and pick up a room key 24-hours-a-day using their credit cards. Supermarkets in Germany and abroad are also increasingly replacing cashiers with automated check-out stands where customers can scan and pay for their own purchases.

Hobby cook Mack began his journey down the automation road after throwing a dinner party for friends. Frustrated as he tried to balance the food he had made for his dinner guests, he came up with the no- hands serving idea.

"It would be easier if the food arrived on a slide," he thought to himself. After consulting with engineer friends and rejecting their ideas, he came up with his own: Specially made hotpots would slide down 15-foot steel spirals, using the forces of gravity, before coming to a slow stop on rails slanted upwards at the customers' tables.

"The principle is so charming because it's so simple," says an enthusiastic Mack. Ever on the go, Mack believes he has already spotted scouts from McDonald's among his customers -- and he would like to do business with the fast food chain.

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.

Fast food, German-style

Dining out at Germany's fully automated "robot" restaurant By Steve Rosenberg BBC News, Nuremberg

Germany likes to call itself the "Land of Ideas" - and over the centuries it has certainly had plenty of them. It was Germans who invented the aspirin, the airship, the printing press and the diesel engine. But Germany has surely never produced anything quite as weird as the automated restaurant. I say "restaurant" - but it actually looks more like a rollercoaster, with long metal tracks criss-crossing the dining area. The tracks run all the way from the kitchen, high up in the roof, down to the tables, twisting and turning as they go. And down the tracks - in little pots with wheels fixed to the bottom - speeds food. Supersonic sausages, high-pace pancakes and wine bottles whizzing down to the customers' tables with the help of good old gravity. One pot is spiralling down so fast, it looks like an Olympic bobsleigh (but it's only Bratwurst). What's more, at the 's Baggers restaurant I wanted to come up with a in Nuremberg, you don't need waiters to complete new restaurant system

order food. Customers use touch-screen TVs to browse the menu and choose their Michael Mack, restaurant owner meal. You can even use the computers to send e-mails and text messages while you wait for the food to be cooked. But all this may not appeal to those who like traditional waiter service. Meals on wheels Up in the kitchen, it is man, not machine, that makes the food. They haven't found a way of automating the chef, just yet. Everything is prepared from fresh. When it is ready, the meal is put in a pot and given a sticker and a colour to match the customer's seat. Then it is put on the rails and despatched downhill to the correct table. Manna from heaven, German-style. The restaurant is the brainchild of local businessman Michael Mack. "I wanted to come up with a complete new restaurant system," Michael tells me, "one that would be more efficient and more comfortable". Replacing waiters with helter-skelters and computers is fun for the customers. It also makes financial sense for the restaurant. "You can save labour costs," explains restaurant spokesperson Kyra Mueller- Siecheneder. "You don't need the waiters to run to the customers, take the orders, run to the kitchen and back to the guests." The restaurant has not completely done away with the human touch. There are still A plate of food whizzes down from the some staff on hand to explain to rather kitchen bemused customers how to use the technology. But what do the punters here think? Do Germans really have the appetite for automated mealtimes? "It's another art for eating. I like it!" one man raves. "It's more for young people than old people," a woman tells me. "My mother was here yesterday and she needs my son's help to order." Watching all this food raining down on the restaurant makes me ravenous. I decide that it is my turn to test the system. I order steak and salad on the computer and wait for it to appear. A few minutes later, a pot glides down to my table with my "fast food" - and it is delicious. As I finish the meal and prepare to leave, one final thought crosses my mind. An automated meal doesn't only save the restaurant money, but the customer, too. After all, in a restaurant without waiters, there is no need to leave a tip....

 BEAUTY  FASHION  FOOD 100% AUTOMATED RESTAURANT – GERMANY’S ROBOT RESTAURANT Food— 27 December 2012

In Nuremberg, Germany, there exists a restaurant that is fully staffed and operated by robots. As foreign

as this might sound, this restaurant has amazingly been around since 2007. Besides the chefs and cleaning

staff, there is only one other human involved in the restaurant, with the single role of updating the robots

and eliminating possible errors that may arise.

Visitors may experience an overwhelmed feeling entering the establishment which can be best described

as futuristic. Each table is equipped with a touchscreen menu, at which customers can place their orders.

Your order is then transferred to the kitchen, where it takes only a couple of minutes for your meal to

slide down a long spiralling slide and land in front of you on your table. It’s certainly not everyday that we get to experience a fully automated service from robots so if you’re looking for a new and exciting experience, this is definitely worth a try! Waiter-less, Fully-Automated Restaurant Opens in Germany by Terrence O'Brien on August 27, 2007 at 11:29 AM FILED UNDER: 001000

Who has time or patience any more to deal with waiters? Apparently not Michael Mack, the proprietor of 's Bagger's (yes, it's spelled with an apostrophe-s), a one- of-a-kind, fully-automated restaurant situated on the outskirts of Nuremberg, Germany.

's Bagger's does away with a wait staff entirely. Patrons order via touchscreen computers at their tables, rather than from an impatient server who is only trying to pay his or her way through acting school. All the computers are networked and track the the level of culinary supplies left (so you'll know what they've run out of), as well as give customers an approximate wait time for their drinks and dishes.

The best part is when the food comes. Like a scene straight out of 'The Jetsons,' the plate loads of food are sent down a series spiraling rails and delivered to the diner's seat through the magic of gravity. According to one diner interviewed by Spiegel Online, the system reminded her of the automated systems used to feed pigs on farms.

The only question that remains is, when will the cooks be replaced with robots?

BTW, 's Baggers reminds us of our favorite NYC coffee place, which uses transparent pneumatic tubes to transport coffee beans to grinders. The freshly- ground coffee is then used, by actual people, to make delicious coffee. No word on whether those baristas will be replaced by robots, either.