BacK To The future

A restaurant without waiters, without workers behind the counter, without any visible employees whatsoever, where you simply feed your money into a glass-enclosed kiosk, remove a steaming plate of freshly made food, and carry it to your table. Sound like a new trend in food service?

Welcome to Horn & Hardart, circa 1950, a restaurant chain that once had 40 locations in New York City and dozens more across the U.S. This was a time when automats served hundreds of thousands of urban customers every day. We are moving in that direction again. But first a bit of history.

The Original Automat

Many consider The Automat to be an exclusively American phenomenon, but in fact, the world's first restaurant of this kind opened in Berlin, Germany in 1895. Named Quisisana -- after a company that also manufactured food-vending machines -- this high-tech eatery established itself in other northern European cities, and Quisisana soon licensed its technology to Joseph Horn and Frank Hardart, who opened the first American automat in Philadelphia in 1902.

The Idea Took Hold

As with so many other societal trends, it was in turn-of-the-century New York that automats really took off. The first New York Horn & Hardart opened in 1912, and soon the chain had hit on an appealing formula: customers exchanged dollar bills for handfuls of nickels (from attractive women behind glass booths, wearing rubber tips on their fingers), then fed their change into vending machines, turned the knobs, and extracted plates of meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and cherry pie, among hundreds of other menu items. Dining was communal and cafeteria-style, to the extent that Horn & Hardart automats were considered a valuable corrective to the snobbery of so many New York City restaurants.

Fresh-Brewed Coffee for a Nickel

Horn & Hardart was also the first New York restaurant chain to offer its customers fresh-brewed coffee, for a nickel a cup. Employees were instructed to discard any pots that had been sitting for more than twenty minutes, a level of quality control that inspired Irving Berlin to compose the song "Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee" (which quickly became Horn & Hardart's official jingle). There were no Lattes, Cappuccinos or double decaf Mochaccinos, but in terms of reliability, Horn & Hardart could be considered the 1950's equivalent of Starbucks.

Fading in Popularity by the 1970s

By the 1970s, automats like Horn & Hardart were fading in popularity, and the culprits were easy to identify.

1. Fast-food chains like McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken offered much more limited menus, but a more identifiable "taste," and they also enjoyed the benefits of lower labor and food costs.
2. Urban workers were less inclined to punctuate their days with leisurely lunches, complete with appetizer, main course, and dessert, and preferred to grab lighter meals on the fly; one imagines that the fiscal crisis in 1970's New York also encouraged more people to bring their meals to the office from home. The last one on 42nd Street and Third Ave in Manhattan finally closed its doors in 1991.

Many of you are too young to remember Horn & Hardart or The Automat. But, many of you will soon be experiencing the impact of the Automat in new formats.

The New Breeds of Automats

One of the first was Eatsa, which opened in San Francisco in 2015 and expanded to NYC, seemed unlike Horn & Hardart in every way conceivable: everything on the menu is made with quinoa, and ordering is done via an iPad, after a brief interaction with a virtual ma?tre d'. But the basic concept was the same: with no human interaction at all, a customer can watch as her meal almost magically materializes in a small cubby flashing her name.

Unfortunately, for various reasons the company closed in 2019 and rebranded as a tech company.

Then of course, remembering that the Germans were the first to try automat-like restaurants, it should come as no surprise that they to have a version of the new automat. This is Baggers in Nuremberg.

Other robotic restaurants include Spyce in Boston where food is made by robots but delivered by humans,

Chowbotics in San Francisco which started with salad machines,

Robot.He in Shanghai and Hey Zeus in Australia

Finally perhaps most interesting albeit a bit creepy, Dalu Robot in Jeevan China – here android robots meet and greet you. Then A dozen robot employees deliver food on automated bicycles moving along the in-built restaurant’s track. They communicate in electronic voices and resemble famous movie characters such as Star Wars droids or cartoon Wall-e. Robots do not only serve food but also smile and entertain their guests with dancing.

And finally, a bit less futuristic, borrowing a technique pioneered by Disco Sushi in London here is an Indian brunch restaurant in Delhi where the food comes around on a conveyor belt and you just take what you want

All of these restaurants are finding it very easy to raise Series A funding as many investors are eager to participate in this fast-growing trend of enhanced restaurant automation.

And, of course, it all makes perfect sense when you consider Chris Albrecht comments in The Spoon, “Robots, of course, are great at repetitive, manual tasks, especially in high-traffic, high-volume establishments. They don’t call in sick, don’t get tired and don’t ask for a raise. And with new breakthroughs, robots are getting better at doing more delicate tasks, which is necessary when handling food,”

Perhaps Even More Interesting and Best At Filling A Real Consumer Need We Do End Up back To The Future

Last weekend while visiting friends in Stone Ridge, NY I experienced a somewhat different variation. This is not a restaurant but a butcher open 24X7. It is called The Applestone Meat Co. and it is a very high-quality meat purveyor that provides access to all manner of meats 24X7 through its vending machines. Rather than just benefit the restaurateur / food purveyor by reducing his labor costs, this application of the original Automat vending machine has a real and needed customer benefit

After hours this section of the store is open and with a quick swipe of a credit card you can take out everything and anything from whole chickens and roasts to sausages and hams.

I suspect that this too will become a trend, particularly in rural areas where shops are few and far between and people work late.