I've always thought some kind of automated drink mixing system would be good for busy inner city cocktail bars. You can still have a bar where people can sit and watch someone mix drinks, but the rest of the venue can be tables with table service. The orders from the tables are taken by a person and gets sent to the kitchen where the drinks are made by machine. This will retain the personal touch of people attending to tables personally, and allow them to serve drinks often, promptly and consistently.
I don't mean this in a disrespectful way, but what kinds of drinks are you drinking and where are you drinking them? Yes, a robotic mixer might work in a crappy bar for standard bar drinks like a Rum and Coke, Long Island Iced Tea, etc., but anything beyond the standard pour-and-serve is probably best done by the human touch, especially if you're charging big city prices for them.
That said, there are some places that do use quick mixers to mix up the classics. Garduños, a huge Albuquerque, NM mexican restaurant (as seen in Breaking Bad, season 5!) uses pre-mixed margarita mix from a keg and dispenses it with a typical bartender's soda gun. They've realized that most people who order "well" margaritas aren't that discerning and appreciate the consistency that a factory-mixed 'rita delivers. Garduños serves them by the gallon and the pre-mix saves them lots of bartender time when they're mixing their most popular cocktail.
This would never fly in a nice bar, though. These days, most big city bars are chasing the money and the money is in "craft cocktails". It's all about the ingredients and the customized drinks that are tailored to the customer's preferences. Bartenders are making a big show out of things like twisting a slice of orange peel to release its oils. The presentation is hugely important here and a robotic mixer just doesn't have the right vibe, in my opinion.
I'm not buying the "robots can't make drinks" argument.
Restaurant automation was big in the 1960s and 70s, but it eventually became a flop. The technology mostly worked, but in the end, customers came more for the "culture" of the restaurant or bar. That is, to chat up the waitress, have a short conversation with the bartender, and most importantly, to not feel lonely.
Part of the "big city prices" is the exclusivity that place delivers, not how fine the process for making the current hot drink is.
Restaurants and bars aren't like most businesses. They don't just deliver product. They deliver some sense of shared culture, some sense of exclusivity, and some sense of 'here is where my kind of people belong.' That is also why we mock chain restaurants, some of which deliver perfectly fine food, but are seen as too 'cookie cutter' for the social experience we demand.
I say bring on the robots. I go to a lot of live music shows and waiting on drinks takes far too long and heaven forbid I get the "too cool for you" bartender and his weird douchbaggery on top of the drink I want. Maybe the bartender role will go the way of the elevator operator or travel agent role. Or higher end places will keep it and the rest will have a bartender sysadmin position to make sure everything keeps running, fills up supply, orders everything, calls service, etc.
They'll probably always need some human around for liability reasons. That is unless the robot bartender is going to add some sort of breathalyzer component to see if people have had too much.
Also unless it's a club it likely would need to scan the person's ID and confirm whether or not the person was who the ID mentioned adding some complexity to the robot that otherwise wouldn't be required for just serving drinks.
The sysadmin person you mentioned could definitely take on that liability role in addition to anything else he needs to do to support the robot.
> I'm not buying the "robots can't make drinks" argument.
I agree. It's the 21st century and robots should eSily cope with making a range of drinks.
And yet, the coffee from my local supermarket machine is undrinkably awful. (And this is my unrefined UK taste buds. I am nowhere near a coffee snob but I can tell cooked old milk). There's a Costa coffee machine in a supermarket. Costa are a big UK brand. The machine is big, about the size of a cola vending machine. That coffee is similarly awful.
So, yes, good robots would be brilliant. I just hope we avoid the lousy robots.
I've seen this argument in many forms. It generally goes: Robots will never be able to do [insert activity here] as well as humans for [insert reason here].
I rather think that this robot is a fantastic v0.01 in what could be the beginning of many hundreds of versions. Some of these future versions will have features that are better than what human bartenders can do, yet, many future versions will still be inferior.
That's exactly when to use such a machine. While I appreciate a great cocktail, that's not what I'm getting on the average Saturday night at the dance club. I would prefer a faster cocktail in many of those cases.
This is stupid. If you've ever actually made a drink, you'll know the only thing a robot can't do that a human can do is peel an orange (maybe, though I'm sure someone could figure that out). I make my old fashioneds and gin and tonics the same way every time. And for a cheaper drink that arrives nearly immediately? A bar like that would be a new favorite hangout.
I don't agree - Pre mixed drinks are the future. Lots of new bars are brining new ideas to cocktails through pre-mixed drinks. http://whitelyan.com/ Is one of them they only sell pre-mixed drinks because they couldn't be created on the spot.
Mixologists are mainly for show it really doesn't matter if its shaken or stirred.
The actual measuring of drinks is not usually the most time-consuming part of making a cocktail. Squeezing fresh fruit juices, preparing fresh fruit for garnishing and shaking with ice usually take most of the time. There's also muddling and stirring sugar into drinks such as the old fashioned which is popular right now. Plus, a good bartender is pretty fast.
Why couldn't a machine shake with ice, and even squeeze certain fruits (e.g. oranges, lemons and such)? It certainly seems easier than many existing processes in factory lines.
assembling a big mac is certainly easier than many existing processes in factory lines, too. Why doesn't a robot do it? (Which could multitask and easily keep track of a dozen items on the grill, moving between them in tenths of seconds.)
Burger king has had fully automated burger cookers for about as long as I've been alive. They're mechanically interesting and I got to study one on a school tour. It turns out the needs for sanitation and cleanliness are the driving design factor and even a "simple" flame-throwin' grill is bumping up against the economic limits at this time. Dealing with bread and refrigerated vegetables would result in the cleaning, sanitization, and QA costs exceeding the cost of simply doing it by hand.
Also simplicity of troubleshooting is critical, in an industry where all non-customer facing labor has converted completely over to illegal aliens. A "paper jam" in the sandwich wrapper, or similar, cannot be allowed to completely shut down the facility. Also employee turnover is an issue, monkey-see monkey-do works pretty well for repetitive manual labor, not so well for obscure robotic troubleshooting procedures.
In summary we have numerous robotic / automated appliances but the majority of labor in a kitchen is best done by hand for numerous design and financial constraints.
Wow, very interesting information. Thanks for sharing your knowledge on the subject. I've always wondered about automation in fast food restaurants, but what you say does make a lot of sense.
The least human interaction I've seen in fast food is Febo in Amsterdam, where you just pick up a pre-made burger from a little "pod" of sorts and pay for it (by handing money to a person) at the back of the store.
Regarding jams and malfunctions: I envision a robot restaurant to not be completely staff free, but still have a trained mechanic on site to deal with any issues like these.
I guess it all comes down to cost, which is unfortunate because it should be cheaper in the long run to cut your staff by 99%. Plus being the first robot restaurant kind of markets itself.
Not long ago I watched a bartender making oyster martinis and he was very careful to ring out each oyster to get all of their juicy goodness into the drink :-)
Although I like oysters, I wasn't tempted to try one...
This reminds me of airport bars. It seems that recently (I don't fly much) they imposed electronic limiters on the alcohol bottles. The bottles will now only pour one shot at a time and record the number of shots poured. I miss the old days of tipping a bit high and receiving an "erronoeous" over-pour. Some things are just better left to humans, I think...
