Waitron, you are bleeping too much
Drone deliveries, DNA diets, 3-D menus and personalised service — how we’ll eat in the future
HAVE a taste of this: you fancy going out for dinner, so you ask your voiceactivated reservations device to recommend a restaurant based on your culinary tastes and budget. When you walk through the restaurant door, staff recognise your face, recall your name and remember it’s your birthday, along with your favourite drink and the most appropriate food for your genetic profile.
You sit down at your interactive smart table and an iBeacon triggers a menu to appear — a virtual buffet that you tap to order. While a kitchen robot chops your salad and flips your burgers, you strap on a headset that whisks you to a virtual world: should you eat your meal underwater or in a sun-drenched Tuscan garden?
Goodbye menus, hello holographic 3-D buffets that you can walk around, listening to a chef chopping or a burger sizzling
Forget about catching the eye of a waiter — Kinect sensors pick up hand gestures that send a request for more wine. And when you’ve finished eating, there’s no waiting for the bill: you get up and leave, automatically paying for your meal with your phone.
Futuristic fantasy? Not at all, say the experts designing tomorrow’s restaurants. Almost all the technology in this scenario is being developed and could soon be headed to a restaurant near you.
“In a technology-enthused world, consumers are used to having things at the touch of their fingertips. Restaurants seem antiquated by comparison — but all that’s about to change,” says Rajat Suri, CEO of the California-based tech company E la Carte, whose cuttingedge tablets are coming to restaurants and pubs in the UK soon.
“Not only will restaurants offer faster experiences in the future, but smarter experiences too,” he says.
Ordering food, customising dishes, discovering the date and time an ingredient was picked or caught, splitting the bill and paying for your meal — all this will be possible at the touch of a screen, without speaking to a waiter.
This is not as clinical as it sounds, apparently, as “personalised customer experiences” play a big part.
Customer-recognition systems such as Cheerfy, already available in the UK, enable restaurants to connect with customers’ cellphones via Wi-Fi the moment they walk in (as long as they’ve opted in). This alerts staff to the customer’s arrival and calls up information on the restaurant’s computer system based on previous visits: likes and dislikes, dietary requirements, VIP status, a photo and date of birth — so if it’s your birthday, a waiter can bring you a glass of champagne.
“We want to deliver the same personal customer experience as you get online with services like Amazon, which knows who you are when you log in and anticipates purchases based on previous buying patterns,” says Cheerfy cofounder Adrian Maseda.
One day, the data may even include your DNA profile, which will alert the kitchen to prepare a meal tailored to your genetic makeup. “You know that scene in the film Minority Report when Tom Cruise walks into Gap and a hologram does a retina scan, welcomes him back and asks how his last purchases worked out? That’s what we’re working towards,” Maseda says.
And where there’s technology, there’s entertainment. Last year, Carluccio’s was the first British restaurant group to roll out virtualreality dining: customers pulled on a headset and experienced the sights and sounds of Sicily as they tucked into their pasta. Augmented reality — where computer-generated 3-D images and sounds are superimposed over actual surroundings — will enable customers to play visually astonishing games or view holograms of dishes on the table in front of them.
Restaurateur Jason Atherton is dipping his toe into augmented reality: this month his City Social bar and restaurant in London is rolling out an app for guests to download, before pointing their phone at a drink and seeing it at the centre of an on-screen artwork, turning a cocktail into a masterpiece.
“Dining out is becoming as much about the experience as it is the food,” says Mandy Saven, head of food, beverage and hospitality at trend forecaster Stylus.
“A number of companies are exploring the use of virtual and augmented reality as a way to elevate the drinking and dining experience.”
Neurogastronomy and multisensory dining — where mood and flavour are dramatically enhanced through the stimulation of all five senses — is another emerging area. Shanghai’s Ultraviolet restaurant pairs its 20-course “avant-garde” menu with lights, sounds, music, scents and projections. And at Sublimotion in Ibiza, “a gastronomic performance experience” serves up gastronomy, drama, music, art, design, technology, magic, illustration and neuroscience in one meal.
Virtual taste may also be on the way: customers could one day be able to use electrodes or LED lights to stimulate the flavour experience. “The notion of digital taste is still in its infancy, but it is a space to watch,” Saven says.
Of course, if you can’t be bothered
Customers pulled on a headset and experienced the sights and sounds of Sicily as they ate their pasta
to go out, ordering in will be an experience too. Food-delivery firm Just Eat is testing delivery droids in London, and plans to roll out the pavement robots this year. Meanwhile, Domino’s is working on expanding pizza deliveries by drone after tests in New Zealand.
And disposing of the pizza box won’t be a problem: all packaging will be edible or compostable within a decade, according to food-trends forecaster Dr Morgaine Gaye.
The future will be all about making it easy for people to order food wherever they are, says Andy White, Just Eat’s technical manager for research. This means that voiceactivated ordering while watching TV (already available on the Amazon Fire TV Stick) will become streamlined and commonplace.
“It’s important for us to have a presence wherever our customers are spending time,” White says. Just Eat is also developing a groundbreaking system that uses Microsoft HoloLens, the eagerly anticipated augmented-reality headset that will enable users to interact with holograms in the real world.
Goodbye boring written menus, hello 3-D buffets that you can walk around, viewing food from different angles and listening to a chef chopping or a burger sizzling.
It’s all a long way from trudging up to the high street for a Chinese meal. And who knows where else food of the future will boldly go? — © Comment on this: write to tellus@sundaytimes.co.za or SMS us at 33971 www.sundaytimes.co.za