> Higher-end restaurants make their humans even more visible and push a hibachi/omakase model…
I agree with all of your points, but…
These Japanese words seem to have taken on vastly new meanings in the US.
1. Hibachi is a charcoal brazier/grill, not a griddle. I think you are referring to a teppan(yaki) (which is a flat griddle). Teppan for making food in front of customers can be found in places like okonomiyaki restaurants and higher end steak houses (subdued affairs minus the Benihana “tricks” by the chefs).
2. Omakase is just chef’s choice. It is not related to whether the preparation can be seen or not. I’m guessing you mean simply sitting at the “sushi bar”/counter seat rather than at a table. One can watch their food being made at a classic diner counter seat as well. Note that one of the best sushi experiences I’ve had in the US (outside of LA in a converted house) was omakase sushi in which we never saw the chef.
All that said, “open kitchens” will almost certainly become signs of a premium dining experience.
Yeah, they are definitely different from their original meanings. It’s my impression that in the US, hibachi usually means “guy cooks steak and similar food in front of you” and omakase usually means “sushi is made in front of you while you sit at a bar.” The words refer more to the style of restaurant or presentation method, which can probably be tied into historical American dining culture in some way or another.
It's probably inevitable that things with a large labor component either become more automated/industrialized or become more of a luxury good (or mostly fade away entirely).
Exactly, I've a close experience with this constrast, I'm originally from Brazil and moved to Sweden some 10 years ago.
In Brazil where labour is cheap you will see a lot of staff at bars, restaurants, shops, etc. on a ratio that seems absolutely overstaffed for the amount of customers. While in Sweden is the complete opposite, in a fully packed large bar you will probably see 4-8 staff members (including guards) for the whole bar, including kitchen.
And there is some conservation of economic output. The overstaffed kitchen is slow, untrained, has little autonomy to make snap decisions (payment machine is broken? Sorry, come back later). The small crew will make collectively make the same as the larger one, and will be able to serve as many or more people.
Maybe. The overstaffed kitchen also has more slack if someone needs to go home sick or has some family emergency. We saw during the pandemic some of the downside of finely-tuned supply chains.
But, yes, it's a balancing act and does depend on the cost of a bit of extra slack or "just in case" margin.
This was happening long before corporations were even a thing.
At one point, roughly 90% of the human race worked in manual agriculture, generally as some form of unfree labor (serfs or slaves), with most of the other 10% as foot soldiers, then a thin veneer of nobles and priests at the top.
Replacing human labor with machinery is pretty much the only thing that has ever improved the general standard of living, whether they are shareholders or not.
1. An error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.
2. Comparing modern economics to serfdom is ridiculous on it's face.
3. What, exactly, are you thinking automated career tracks are going to get replaced with this time around? Keeping in mind you've got Industrial, AG, manufacturing, service, and white collar sectors, the first three are already heavily automated. Automating the last two results in massive unemployment. I'm not hearing any push for realocation of wealth so yeah, how exactly does this not completely brick the economy? While we're on the topic of "improving quality of life" how do you frame the near total economic collapse of rural communities in the US and the transition from a single breadwinner middle class to basically mandatory dual income households as "improving quality of living"?
> 1. An error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.
It wasn't an "error". It was the way things had to be, as shown by pretty much every society that advanced past the hunter-gatherer or roaming barbarian stage. Europe. India. Japan. China. The Americas. All had "nobles" and serfs/slaves/peasants doing hand agricultural labor. Even as far back as Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt!
> 2. Comparing modern economics to serfdom is ridiculous on it's face.
Blind assertion is not proof.
> 3. What, exactly, are you thinking automated career tracks are going to get replaced with this time around?
Dunno, but it's happened every time so far. No one hand-weaves cloth any more (except as a hobby). Essentially no one is a blacksmith any more. Hundreds of professions from broom makers to fullers have been replaced by automation.
Imagine someone asking this question at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It's not possible that they would have said "programmer" or "airline pilot" or "open heart surgeon", or even "convenience store clerk" or "Uber driver".
That's been the history of technology for millennia now. Probably way back in the Paleolithic there was a person like you grumbling that this newfangled flint-knapping was going to put all the pointed stick makers out of work.
Yeah no you don't. Your model of productivity and QoL improvement went off a cliff in the 60s. Since then we have consistently seen stagnant wages, narrowing of social mobility, increases in household debt, increases in required workload to maintain "middle-class" lifestyles, and economic catastrophe in rural communities. Automation in the 70s and 80s gutted manufacturing jobs with no obvious replacement, and that was before entire supply chains were offshored. Advances in ag tech combined with massive consolidation in the industry gutted rural ag communities with no obvious replacement. There are no combination of industries in the US that are reporting a shortfall of ~27M employees, which is the estimated headcount in the combined services industry currently. I see your coy ad hominem bs trying to frame me as a neo-luddite and I'm not impressed.
> Yeah no you don't. Your model of productivity and QoL improvement went off a cliff in the 60s.
I'm not talking about the "60s".
I'm talking about the entire history of the human race from the Paleolithic until now. It's nothing but a long, long list of technological disruptions, and somehow we're all still here and mostly still employed.
> increases in required workload to maintain "middle-class" lifestyles,
I'm sorry, that is simply patent nonsense. You could easily lead a '60s middle-class lifestyle (one family car, eating out just a few tiems a year, maybe one short vacation, house < 1,000 square feet...not to mention all the things we have today that weren't available at all then. For example, the Internet) for a lot less than what the typical "middle-class" lifestyle of today costs.
The average house size in the United States has doubled since 1960.
When I was in graduate school, I bought a small house (about 900 square feet, I think) because I was living on a TA salary (plus, I hate landlords).
The thing is, when that tiny house was built in the 1940s, it housed a married couple and four children. I know because I bought it from the children (their father had passed on, and their mother moved to a nursing home).
> Advances in ag tech combined with massive consolidation in the industry gutted rural ag communities with no obvious replacement.
Imagine what it must've been like when all the serfs were emancipated.
> I see your coy ad hominem bs trying to frame me as a neo-luddite and I'm not impressed.
Oh, it was neither "coy" nor was it an ad hominem. It was explicit.
I don't really care whether or not you're "impressed". Why would you imagine that I would be?
I imagine the "lower-end" will be capped via government mandate preventing a workforce from being more than X% of robotic labor.
...that is, until the robotic chefs bribe the politicians at the Capitol Grille by giving them more french fries with their burgers to support laws for robot rights!
Somewhat off-topic, but I will ask anyway: if preprocessed foods are so strongly linked to the illnesses of modern society, wouldn't be interesting to establish a policy to heavily tax preprocessed foods, like we do for cigarettes?
Then, we stop this charade. If these cooking robots are just glorified assembly lines that require uniform inputs, they should be taxed to the point they do not displace a human. And if you manage to get a "robo-chef" that actually can make good food starting with fresh ingredients, you get all the incentives to put this on every home, school or office building.
> If these cooking robots are just glorified assembly lines that require uniform inputs, they should be taxed to the point they do not displace a human.
A human line cook is also part of a "glorified assembly line that requires uniform inputs". This does not preclude the use of real/fresh ingredients, and also of course requires the employ of a human prep team to turn lumpy items into uniform ingredients.
But a human gets paid for it. The local economy benefits from that. A fully automated system removes any possible middlemen from the chain and exacerbates the concentration of wealth.
Paying people to dig holes only to fill it back again also results in humans getting paid and the local economy "benefiting". That doesn't mean we should be mandating that companies do that, or get the government to enact such programs.
- Digging holes and covering them again does not produce wealth or material well-being. Work in the service industry is nothing like that.
- At no point I said that the only alternative is to keep people employed sub-optimally. If automation does indeed produce more wealth and if the people that are out of the job can pursue better opportunities, then sure let's use it. But it should also be taxed. If we really are aiming for a society that is so automated that will rob the opportunities for the large majority of people to have meaningful work and a living wage, then at the very least some of this wealth needs to be distributed to everyone.
>- Digging holes and covering them again does not produce wealth or material well-being. Work in the service industry is nothing like that.
And having a person flipping burgers even though there's a machine that can do it does "produce wealth or material well-being"?
>- At no point I said that the only alternative is to keep people employed sub-optimally. If automation does indeed produce more wealth and if the people that are out of the job can pursue better opportunities, then sure let's use it. But it should also be taxed. If we really are aiming for a society that is so automated that will rob the opportunities for the large majority of people to have meaningful work and a living wage, then at the very least some of this wealth needs to be distributed to everyone.
How do you decide what should be taxed or not? Should any sort of labor saving device be taxed? Before industrialization 80-90% of people worked in agriculture. Now it's in the single digits. You can therefore plausibly make the case that agriculture "rob[bed] the opportunities for the large majority of people". Should we be taxing tractors as well? Or are burger flipping robots somehow different?
You are thinking McDonalds, I'm talking "The greasy spoon diner next to where I lived in Cambridge that had really good philly cheesesteaks". Yes, having people employed there provides lots of benefits beyond the food. For starters, it was a third-place for some people. If we lose these places, we lose a lot.
Also, I'm talking about taxing restaurants and food that is processed (i.e, not fresh ingredients, preservatives added to extend shelf-life), artificial sugars or sweeteners added for flavor, etc). If you don't want to tax fast food chains because of automation then do it because their food is as addictive and as damaging to our health as cigarettes, if not more.
Yes, agriculture robbed the jobs but it was fine because we could move on to do other things. But we are about to lose the automation race, machines are getting better at doing things that used to be only years of travel ning. "Creative" jobs are getting eliminated because of LLMs. We are not there yet, but we already started this discussion of dispensing of software engineers because of Copilot et caterva. You think you might be safe from the chopping block, but this is not true to the millions of people entering the workforce now.
> Should we be taxing tractors as well?
No. We should be taxing the land owner to make sure the peasants can survive. Or even better, taking it from them and split it more equally.
I don’t want a weird melody or a bad picture, I can have fun making those on my own if you’ll just please save me the time to sort through the laundry basket and get that stuff washed, ironed and back in the wardrobe.
Don’t mistake what I’m asking for here, think ironing exoskeleton not laundry autonomous agent.
With the current trajectory, you'll still have to fold the laundry yourself - but your phone, the washer, the dryer, the laundry basket, the detergent bottle and the actual laundry itself will all give you personalized and very emphatic reminders when it's time to do so.
I've been in the business long enough to know that the suppliers of these robots are going to wring their customers for every cent of recurring revenue they can. Once the kitchen is literally built around and dependent on them, they've got your nuts in a vise and they'll gleefully squeeze as hard as they can.
I imagine these things will break all the time, and have restrictive contracts on who can repair them at high dollar figures, see Mcdonalds ice cream machines X 100.
Except that the robot makers aren't stupid. As with medical equipment, they are going to make the hardware/software a subscription not a one-time payment.
how much % does executive/board make up of total expenses? They might seem big on an absolute basis but I doubt they're the reason restaurants have thin margins.
What are you arguing? That restaurants are getting squeezed by their suppliers? And btw Americans eat out more frequently now than just about any other time in history.
Putting the workforce concerns aside, this is pretty exciting. I think the two easiest parts of the problem to tackle are the prep part and the delivery part. The part in the middle will be the hardest. I expect that the first really successful robot staffed restaurant will be a pizza restaurant. Pretty much all of the parts are already mechanized in the industrial production of frozen pizzas, and the challenge would be to downscale it to a restaurant sized machine that could do the cooking as well.
It reminds me of the operations related to organizing restaurant tables and grilling shrimp in the imitation learning-based project Mobile Aloha(https://mobile-aloha.github.io/).
Maybe this is a weird take, but I wish most eateries would ditch waiters. They're a relic of the industrial revolution making "fine dining" available to the common folk. And a large amount of the frustration at restaurants is one of two things: how something's cooked, and the service someone receives. Remove the waiter and there's no more frustration over service. I don't need a personal attendant to bring me water; I see a jug of water, I have legs/arms, I go get my water.
In Japan you can order your katsu curry on a machine, pay, hand in a ticket, and grab your food when someone calls your number. Same for sandwich shops in the US. Automats used to have bays where you'd just go up to a window, put in a quarter, and take out some premade food. There's no reason you couldn't handle pancakes, bacon & eggs, spaghetti, etc the same ways. Your cooked food is already sitting under a heat lamp in the kitchen waiting for the waiter to bring it to you; why not just get up and get it yourself? You get your food faster, or when you're ready for it.
Yeah this would displace a lot of workers. But that's what progress does: an advancement displaces old workers, and new efficiency creates an opportunity for new products and services which need new workers. The treadmill of labor in a progressing society.
Fast casual is a pretty popular category with better burgers etc. that you order at the counter. In the UK, it's pretty common to order and pay for pub food at the bar and have someone just deliver it to your table. If I'm by myself and there are seats at the bar for eating that's what I'll often do.
Totally depends on the experience you're looking for. On the other hand, if I'm having a "nice" meal out, I probably do expect table service.
