Reviewing the Robot Restaurants of San Francisco
Remember that time Silicon Valley invented “co-housing”? And then it turned out that that was really just roommates rebranded to sound more enticing?
Or what about the time when Silicon Valley invented “ridesharing”? The concept sounded way cool: sharing a ride with just a normal driver and paying way less money than for a taxi? Sign me up. Then it turned out that that just meant a taxi without labor laws or worker protections.
Now the next thing Silicon Valley is inventing is robot restaurants. It sounds super-sweet. Admittedly, the only robots I know are the ones from Daft Punk, but if they made me a drink or a meal, I’d consume it excitedly.
Unfortunately, it turns out even these “robot” restaurants aren’t staffed by Daft Punk. In fact, they’re pretty much just a spin on the kind of so-called robots that have existed since 1947. That’s when the Kwik Kafe was invented, a vending-machine-dispenser thing in which you inserted a nickel to get a coffee drink of your choice. The robot behind the scenes might have just been gears and tubes — no arms or sweet LED helmets — but it was definitely a robot that made coffee.
Which brings me to this review. There are now a number of start-ups competing in the robot restaurant “space” — I can’t believe I’m using that word — that basically do what Kwik Kafe does. Only unlike the Kwik Kafe machines, these start-ups’ machines are venture backed. That makes them more exciting or something, right?
Fortunately, we’re still a decade or two away from reaching the point where editors, writers and restaurant reviewers can be automated. If Daft Punk were a restaurant-critic duo, I would read the shit out of their columns, but if history is any indication, the first robot restaurant critics will probably just resemble a disgusting series of tubes and gears — wherein you dump food and drink in one end, wait for the machine to masticate and analyze the food, then wait for an auto-generated Medium article with the robo-critic’s verdict.
Until that fateful day, you’re stuck with a review written by me, a real human who needs to breathe and eat and sleep and has an actual soul and feelings. I’m sorry.
The basic gist of CafeX is that it automates the barista, which is a robot arm encased behind glass so you can’t touch it. I think one of the supposed benefits of robots versus people is that they’re cleaner, but I was weirded out by the fact that this robot didn’t ever clean or wipe down its space. It just moved cups around inside its glass cylinder (you can see how its “hand” is shaped to hold cups, and that’s about it). Maybe the cleaning robot comes at night. (I’m imagining a mini Roomba that moves around this glass cylinder, but knowing Silicon Valley, more likely it’s some underpaid contract worker.)
There are three CafeX locations in SF, one on Market Street, one on Bush Street and one inside the Metreon, which is where I went. The robot arm moves between the milk-pouring and espresso-making areas to produce the normal selection of coffee drinks: espressos, mochas, hot chocolate, lattes, etc.
The first time I tried to patronize CafeX, I paid for a mocha, only to discover that the machine was out of cups. I didn’t notice at first because I didn’t really understand how the machine worked. But it was weird to watch the robot arm grasp at a cup that wasn’t there, then give up and go into a resting position. It looked defeated.
I didn’t get a refund. You would think this would be a fairly easy concept to program into these machines — “If I don’t have the product, I don’t charge the customer” — but apparently, I was wrong; these machines are really fucking stupid. Forgive me if I don’t think Skynet is in our near future; if a robot can’t even figure out when cups have run out, I don’t have high hopes for them taking over the planet.
Somehow I came back and wasted another $4, this time on a peppermint hot chocolate, because normally I’m embarrassed to order a little-kid drink from a human barista. The robot didn’t judge me, thankfully.
However, I came to miss the presence of a human barista. The drink was way too sweet, and there was no one to say, “Pardon me, can you make this slightly sweet next time?” CafeX hasn’t proven to me that machines can do better than humans or that it’s smarter than a 1947-era Kwik Kafe. For that, CafeX, you get a lone star.
Rating: One star
CafeX, cafexapp.com, One Bush Plaza, 1 Market St, San Francisco
This is the only marginally cute robot restaurant in the whole lot. The concept is incredibly simple: a number of herb- and tea-dispensing jars sit atop the machine. You specify the combination of what you want on the digital screen. They’re dispensed accordingly into the cup, and then hot water is poured in. The black plastic lid you put atop the cup doubles as a filter.
Is this an “innovation” in tea? Not really. It’s just a different way of going about tea preparation in an extremely controlled manner. I selected 40 percent cacao nibs and 60 percent amaretto black-tea leaves for a comforting drink that tasted sweet but had no sweetener. The price point is pretty low, around $3 depending on one’s selection, though you have to pay by credit card (otherwise, how are they going to get customer data that they can monetize?). I don’t think the machine is all that popular; there wasn’t a line like there was at the CafeX robot. This machine is in the Westfield Mall near the escalator that leads up to the movie theater.
This type of robot isn’t really a job stealer, as I believe it can totally coexist with humans serving tea. By which I mean, teaBOT is not replicating the curated tea experience you’d get at a fancy tea shop, or even at Boba Guys; the product is designed to be consistent and isn’t about terroir the way that high-end tea places are. I’d give this three stars on the basis of the experience and the price point.
Rating: Three stars
teabot, teabot.com, 845 Market St, San Francisco
I had the pleasure of visiting the Blendid headquarters about a year ago while doing research for a different article, before I ever got this assignment. That means I wasn’t experiencing this as a consumer, but a VIP. Yes, I got to sample the special company-subsidized test machine that they keep on-site, and thus over the course of a few hours tried four-ounce cups of every conceivable smoothie they made.
As implied, Blendid is a smoothie-making robot. Functionally, it’s extremely similar to CafeX: there’s a robot arm that moves from blender to blender to cup, mixing smoothies and then pouring them out accordingly. Like CafeX, there’s a plexiglass screen separating the smoothie operation from your grubby hands.
The difference between this and CafeX is that the internal mechanism is…really messy. Having things like powders and fast-moving blades means that there is some spillage happening; by the end of the lunch hour, the Blendid operation needed a wipe-down.
The robot arm itself is pretty stoical: it doesn’t really have a personality. (None of these bots does.) However, it does put on a pretty good show, particularly when it messes up. Because it’s behind plexiglass, with only two cutouts in the glass to push the drink over to the consumer, the Blendid bot isn’t immediately accessible if it, say, fails to put the cup under the spot where it’s pouring or slips while it’s moving the blender. Hence I got to witness several moments in which these mistakes happened, during which the stressed-out engineers started yelling, “Get the stick! The stick! Quick!”
“The stick” was a standard grabber tool of the kind one might use to pick up trash. If they didn’t grab the stick in time and use it to place the cup underneath where the robot was about to pour, the robot would dump the smoothie from the blender into a puddle on the surface of the table.
However, manipulating “the stick” through the tiny mousehole while the bot was moving about on its own was an exercise in agility and speed, and the engineers did not always succeed.
My delight in seeing the Blendid bot vomit green smoothie liquid all over its pristine surface, then continue mixing and blending the next drink as if nothing happened, while engineers scrambled to try to clean the interior via “the stick” before the bot smeared around the mess again — well, let’s just say that that experience alone was worth five stars.
The only SF location of Blendid is in the Market Cafe at the University of San Francisco. The one that I went to is inside the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale.
Rating: Five stars
blendid, 2130 Fulton Street, Market Cafe,University of San Francisco
You’ve probably read about Amazon’s spin on a convenience store in the news, but if not, here’s how it works: you just walk in, grab what you want and walk out, as if you’re stealing — but you’re not, because Amazon’s cameras watch you and note what you grab and take off the shelf, then bill you accordingly. So in essence, the “robot” part of this establishment is merely the cashier; there are lots of humans moving around restocking things.
It’s a fairly quotidian convenience store, designed with San Franciscans’ tastes in mind. However, the truly terrifying thing about Amazon Go is how it actually works.
If you look up at the ceiling, you will see more cameras than you have ever seen in your entire life. It’s not like 10 or 20 security cameras; it’s more like several hundred. My smartphone camera fought against the fluorescent light to capture them well, but you can sort of see them in this image — every one of those square boxes in the ceiling lattice is some kind of camera and sensor rig.
What makes this truly terrifying is that to walk into the store, you have to download an app that links to your Amazon account. Amazon may have known a fair bit about me before — at least my shopping habits — but I can’t say they knew what I looked like. Now they have literally thousands of images of me from all conceivable angles, enough to reconstruct a 3D model of my body that could conceivably be doctored into surveillance cameras in order to frame me for some crime, should I do something that politically inconveniences them. That might sound paranoid, but I’m a tech-industry critic who wrote an entire book about how Amazon and the tech giants are complicit in subverting democracy, and given that tech journalists were secretly spied upon by Uber, I have absolutely no trust in any of the tech giants when it comes to my privacy. Fuck this surveillance state of a store, and fuck Amazon. Negative stars. I’m not even telling you where it is because I don’t want more people going there and gifting 3D scans of their body to dictator-in-waiting Bezos.
Rating: Negative
Location: You must find on your own if you desire
Just a regular old vending machine, the original robot food source. You put in money; it gives you a Coke or a water. It doesn’t spy on you; it doesn’t have any robot arms to spill drinks all over; there are no salivating VCs trying to monetize your personal data; and the drinks are really cheap.
Also, you can tilt it over and smash the front in an emergency or apocalypse situation when you’re thirsty.
Rating: Five stars
Reviewing the Robot Restaurants of San Francisco
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