New Restaurant Invention Very Touching
People who study these things tell us that restaurants have been around at least 800 years. After that much time, you’d think the mechanics of the restaurant would be pretty much set. The workings of such basic restaurant accouterments such as tables and waiters seemed well established. Not anymore. Restaurant customers, meet the future . . . interactive tabletop menus.
Interactive menus have been around for a few years. They have until recently involved placing a touchpad device on a table and having diners push buttons to see a menu and order food. These type installations seem popular in Japan. And Bytes restaurant in Canterbury, England started a touch screen menu in 2006. Bytes’ menus are at the tables as stand-alone panels, but are not integrated into the tabletop.
Adour, the upscale restaurant in New York’s St. Regis hotel, features a small wine bar with a bar top that provides touch screen menus to obtain information about wine offerings.
The uWink restaurant chain was started in California by the creator of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese, Nolan Bushnell. uWink has computer touchscreen-type devices placed at the tables that allow you to order, customize your order, and get nutritional information about your meal. After you place your order, you can play video games, take surveys or watch movie trailers while waiting for your food. uWink plans to expand into the South Florida area in the next year, so keep a lookout.
These are nice developments, but the interactive menu that really got us interested was found at Inamo, an Oriental fusion restaurant and bar in London’s West End. Inamo has taken the interactive menu a step further, making it truly a “tabletop” menu. Inamo’s interactive tabletop menu system uses projectors located above the tables to project images onto the tabletops in front of diners. The tabletop is actually a touchscreen device. Patrons touch the tabletop to activate the menu. A list of food and drink offerings appears, along with photos of each. Touching the picture of a dish enlarges the photo and gives details of the food. Touch an “Order This” button and the order is sent to the kitchen, cooked and delivered to your (very smart) table.
But wait, there’s more! Inamo allows you to choose from seven different (virtual) tablecloths, so you can set your own mood. And not only can you play games on the tabletop, you can use them to get information about the neighborhood and even call a cab. Can using these to encourage social interaction between patrons be far behind? A My Space in the real world?
Inamo was designed by English architectural firm Blacksheep, and is the brainchild of entrepreneurs Danny Potter and Noel Hunwick. The duo offers customers high-quality Asian fusion cuisine, with an emphasis on allowing patrons to customize their own dining experience via the tabletop interfaces.
All this technology is fun, but do you worry you’ll be treated like one of those annoying automated telephone menu systems? Not to worry, waiters are nearby and you can call one from your tabletop.
Will this technology eventually make waiters a thing of the past? We’re not for sure, but it could decrease the number of waiters needed. One thing that is for sure, the mechanical workings of restaurants may have been stable for 800 years, but they are changing now. Touchscreen tabletops, choosing your own virtual tablecloths, calling a cab on your table. What’s next, some exotic new-fangled menu items, maybe a saki mojito? Oh . . . seems it’s already on Inamo’s menu.
