ive always liked the idea of automated restaurants. weve seen what automation has done for car production, so its interesting to imagine what an automated restaurant might be like. since the food is the product of very exact expenditures of energy, time and resources, you could forecast, resupply and otherwise manage your output and resource levels in a much more accurate way, for one.

and of course, you could make the food a lot faster i would imagine. and you could make it perfect every time. and you wouldnt have to pay people huge amounts of money to make it. i would also advocate for automating the delivery of the food to the table but that might be off putting to customers, so you could just build a system that would automate most of the mental load of managing tables and just use your human employees as meat puppets for the delivery software. perhaps something like google glass could be used. i bet you could reduce your serving staff very dramatically by doing that.

and as for ingredients, you could even grow some of them. ive seen videos about restaurants in new york that use roof top aquaponics systems to grow all their vegetables. whether on the roof or off site, one would need to run both production and processing and delivery in order for uniform quality to be achieved. the quality of the ingredients is supremely important -- i went to sauls in the bay area and their cheese burger literally gave me pause. if you want to know the difference between average ingredients and good ingredients, go try the cheese burger at sauls medium well.

even outside of automation, there are so many improvements to be made. i used to work in a restaurant and they would cook food on these large woks. i would guess more than a third of the energy from the flames below simply go around the wok and up out of the vent hood. automating the heating of the food would probably make it much easier to capture and use all of that thermal energy instead of half.