Robot server delivers pies, tells jokes at Oviedo pizzeria
“It’s just for fun and entertainment for the guests. You’ve got to stay relevant, stay new and stay different.”
Playa Pizza owner Stephen Facella
A robot at Oviedo’s Playa Pizza brings food to diners and can do other tasks like take dirty dishes back to the kitchen.
The machine can also tell jokes, although they don’t always make sense, and there are plans to get “her” a lifeguard uniform to go with the restaurant’s beach theme, Playa Pizza owner Stephen Facella said.
He has yet to name the robot, which has a cat-like face.
Robots are appearing at some restaurants across the state, but don’t expect a huge wave of them replacing restaurant staffs. Nearly two years after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and its disruption to dining establishments, automation hasn’t stopped humans from working as servers, bartenders and cooks.
“It just really hasn’t happened,” said Robert Maxim, a Brookings Institution senior research associate whose work includes automation’s effects on U.S. workers. ”The pandemic was kind of an ideal test case on whether it was viable to replace servers.”
Even with wages growing as many restaurants struggle to find staff, Maxim said restaurant workers still are cheaper to employ than investing in robots.
“Automation only makes sense when it’s cheaper than labor,” Maxim said.
At Playa Pizza, Facella said the robot is not replacing jobs. The 2,000-squarefoot eatery opened last year off Mitchell Hammock Road and employs 11 people.
“It’s just for fun and entertainment for the guests,” he said. “You’ve got to stay relevant, stay new and stay different.”
Facella also plans to have a robot in a larger Playa Pizza location that is targeted to open in March off Reams Road near Walt Disney World. The machine could help bussers there run dishes back to the dishwasher in the 4,000-square-foot eatery. Facella expects that restaurant will employ 40 humans.
“It will keep our employees on the floor interacting with guests so they don’t have to go back and forth to the kitchen,” Facella said.
Facella said he found the robot through an advertisement on Facebook. He did not say how much it cost, other than that it was “a lot of money.”
“I wired money to China and prayed it
was real,” Facella said.
He said the robot came from a company called PuduTech. It calls the machine Bella, but Facella is thinking he’ll go with something else.
Facella said the robot is web-based, and he mapped the Oviedo restaurant to program the machine to know the table numbers. There are options for the robot to deliver food to a certain table or to go to a table and sing “Happy Birthday.” It can run meals to four tables at a time, Facella said.
Not every automation in the service industry lasts. Walmart in 2019 started using autonomous machines to scan shelves of merchandise in Orlando to check inventory, but it pulled the plug on the technology in 2020. The retailer said it planned to continue testing other technologies.
Restaurants that were most suited to automation, such as fast-food chains, are already saturated with it, Maxim said. Self-ordering kiosks at those restaurants were around before the pandemic. While Facella sees how his robot could be used to replace someone like a host, he said he believes that would get rid of the human connection of dining out.
“Hospitality is about people,” Facella said. “It’s handshakes and happy hours. You don’t have that from a robot.”
It’s a point echoed by Maxim.
“You can’t ask the app what it recommends on the menu the way you can a server,” Maxim said. “Robots, apps, they don’t eat. They don’t have food preferences.”