14 years ago, my best friend and I had an idea for a waiter-less restaurant. It would have iPads leveled right into the table’s surface. You would order there, check out, and a few minutes later, the food would magically appear in front of you.
We thought about the layout of the restaurant. We mulled on where the food would come from. Would the kitchen be in the center, hidden behind the restaurant walls, with sliding doors opening so you can turn around and just grab your food? Would it have some mechanism to raise the food directly in front of you via a dumbwaiter, kind of like it works in the Great Hall in Harry Potter? We brainstormed for quite a while. I still have the sketches.
Of course, like most 19-year-olds tend to do, in the end, we did nothing with our idea. It’s a symptom of youth I wish I had treated earlier: Big dreams, little action. But to this day, once a year or so, I check on the state of waiterless restaurants. In the years hence, I’ve learned a lot about this concept.
For one, there are plenty of waiterless restaurants around the world today, and they all put their own unique spin on this idea. One place in Shanghai has little, vacuum-looking robots deliver your food on a sort of “robot highway” next to the tables. Tokyo has everything from robot arms pouring your coffee to a fully staffed restaurant with robot waiters to one where the robots are remote-controlled by home-bound people to give them something meaningful to do. And a Germany company from Nuremberg has tested and opened over 13 “rollercoaster restaurants” across the world, where the food slides right in front of you via a network of intricate tracks.
Recently, for the first time, I had the good fortune of visiting one of those restaurants. FoodLoop, it’s called, and it sits right in the heart of Europa-Park, Europe’s second-biggest theme park. My girlfriend and I sat down and ordered from iPads. Less than three minutes later, our drinks arrived. Thanks to the numbers on each item which matched the numbers on our seats, everything that slid down the tracks to our five-person table was quickly allocated to the right person. The pot with our salmon and potatoes was sealed with several rubber bands. It came fast, hot, and delicious. Given we were in a theme park, the meal wasn’t cheap, but that was to be expected. We paid and within less than half an hour, we could get back to more rides. Sweet!
It took over a decade, but finally, I went to a waiterless restaurant, and to my own surprise, I must say: It’s just not that good. As fun as they are, the joy of all these gimmicks quickly fades—but you know what never gets old? Genuine human interaction.
Not even the world’s slickest robot can beat a real human being, who had to get up in the morning, wash themselves, and get dressed, standing in the sun for a brief moment after handing you your meal, leaning back, crossing their arms and holding their elbow with one hand, laughing and saying, “Yes. I remember that. I was there too once. It’s beautiful.” That interaction itself is also beautiful. As my very latest research only seems to confirm, it might, in fact, be irreplaceable—because as it turns out, we have tried—and failed at—establishing waiterless restaurants since the late 1800s. Yes, even before the industrial revolution. That’s how much people hated waiters after the job had first appeared a few decades prior.
As early as 1896, a German engineer developed the “Automat,” a word we use to this day for “vending machine,” and his restaurant worked about the same. The walls were lined with little cabinets containing food items. You just walked up, inserted coins, and the doors opened, presenting you with coffee, sandwiches, and other snacks. For a while, the concept bloomed in the US. From Atlas Obscura:
By 1927, there were 15 Automats in New York City. Around World War II, at the height of the Automat’s popularity, Horn & Hardart had over 80 locations in Philadelphia and New York. They were serving 350,000 customers per day.
How many are they serving today? You can probably guess: zero. The last location closed in 1991. But people keep trying. Eatsa, an innovative food company, opened several Automat-design restaurants across the US from 2016–2017. Two years later, they were all closed for good. Even 130 years later, it seems we are not ready for waiterless restaurants. Maybe we will never be. But at the very least, now I don’t feel so bad about not acting on my idea from way back when. As it turns out, it, too, was just not that good.
It’s okay to move on from most of your “flashes of genius” without blinking an eye. Don’t worry about the things you’ll never do. Chances are, they’re just not that good—and you already know which path you’re meant to walk.