Culture
The Automation of the American Lunch
A new San Francisco restaurant seems novel—but it’s actually the latest iteration of a decades-old fascination with vending halls.
At Eatsa, a new restaurant in San Francisco’s Embarcadero neighborhood, diners are deliberately estranged from their food. It’s a far cry from locavore mania, based on visceral connection to the land, in which diners want to taste the dirt and learn about the hands that tended the crops. At this fully automated restaurant, there’s very little transparency. Diners order via in-store iPads, and their food pops up behind a window. SFGate explains:
It’s not quite the first of its kind. A national cupcake chain has an ATM that dispenses sugary confections. A Shanghai vending machine pours out cups of ramen.