The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Welcome to the digital age of smart dining and robot chefs
Holographic menus, droid delivery and virtual cocktails. All coming to a restaurant near you, says Sue Quinn
Have a taste of this: you fancy going out for dinner, so you ask your voice-activated reservations device to recommend a restaurant based on your culinary taste sand budget. When you walk through the restaurant door, staff instantly 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 dow n at you r i nter ac t ive smart table and an ibeacon triggers a menu to appear – a vir tual 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? forget about catching the eye of a server – 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 now being developed and could soon be headed to a restaurant near you. ‘In a technolog y-ent hused 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, chief executive of the Califor nia-based tech company E La Carte, whose cutting-edge tablets are coming to restaurants and pubs in the UK soon. ‘Not only will rest aura nt s offer faster experiences in the future, but smarter experiences, too.’ 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 server.
This is not as clinical as it sounds, apparently, as ‘personalised customer experiences’ play a big part in the future. Customer-recognition systems such as Cheerf y, already available in the UK, enable re st aura nt s to connect wit h customers’ telephones v ia Wif i t he moment they walk through the door (as long as they’ve opted in). This alerts staff to the customer’s arrival and flags up i nfor mat ion on t he re st au r a nt ’s computer system based on data gathered on previous visits: likes and dislikes, dietary requirements, VIP status, a photo and date of birth – so if it’s your birthday, a server can bring you a celebratory 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
Goodbye menus, hello holographic 3D buffets you can walk around, listening to a chef chopping or a burger sizzling
purchases based on previous buying pat ter ns,’ says Cheerf y ’s co-founder 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 make-up. ‘You know that scene in the film Minority
Report when Tom Cr uise 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.
A nd where t he re ’s te c h nol og y, there’s enter tainment. Last year, Carluccio’s was the first British restaurant g roup to roll out vir tual-realit y ( VR) dining: customers pulled on a headset and experienced the sights and sounds of Sicily as they tucked into their pasta. Augmented reality (AR) – where computer-generated 3D images and sounds a re super i mposed over ac t ua l su rroundings – will enable customers to play v i sua l ly a s toni sh i ng g a mes or view holograms of dishes on the table in f ront of t hem. Restaurateur Jason Atherton is already dipping his toe into AR: this month his City Social bar and restaurant in London is set to roll out an app for guests to download, before pointing their phone towards a drink and seeing it placed 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 St ylus. ‘A number of companies a re exploring the use of vir tual and augmented reality as a way to elevate the drinking and dining experience.’
Neuroga st ronomy a nd mult isensory dining – where mood and flavour a re dra matica lly enhanced t hrough t he st imulation of all f ive senses – is a not her emerg i ng a re a. Sha ngha i’s Ult r av iolet re s t au r a nt pa ir s it s 20course ‘avant-garde’ menu with lights, sounds, music, scents and projections. And Sublimot ion in Ibiza, ‘a gast ronomic 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 to go out, ordering in will be an experience too. Food-delivery firm Just Eat is currently testing delivery droids in three areas of London, and plans to roll out the pavement robots across the capital later this year. Meanwhile, Domino’s is working on ex pa nding pizza deliveries by dr one after a successful maiden voyage in New Zeala nd last year. And disposing of t he pizza box won’t be a problem: all packaging will be e d ible or compost able wit hi n a decade, according to food-trends forecaster Dr Morgaine Gaye.
The future will be all about making it easy for hungry people to order food wherever they are, says Andy White, Just Eat’s senior technical manager for product re se a rch. This means t hat voice-activated ordering while watching TV (already available on the Amazon Fire TV Stick) or gaming on the Xbox will become st rea mlined a nd more 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 new system that uses Microsoft Hololens, the eagerly anticipated augmented-reality headset, which will enable user s to i nterac t wit h holograms in the real world. Goodbye boring writ ten menus, hello 3D buf fet s that you can walk around, viewing food from different angles, and listening to a chef chopping or a burger si zzli ng. (Microsoft Hololens is only available to developers and commercial users, with no public release date as yet.)
It’s all a long way from trudging up to t he high st reet for a Chinese. And who k nows where else food of t he future will boldly go?