Fast Food's Robotic Revolution

When will robots finally take over the fast-food business?

- Elizabeth G. Dunn

It’s 1 P.M. in New York City, and the delis and fast-casual joints that line the streets of midtown are devolving into loud, heaving scrums of office workers rattling off orders for turkey on rye, and kale salads with dressing on the side, and Diet Cokes, no ice.

Which is why when I walk into Eatsa on Madison Avenue the first thing I notice is the silence. Some of the customers streaming in approach a phalanx of iPad kiosks; others proceed directly to the far end of the restaurant, where orders materialize within a wall of cubbies that bring to mind food replicators out of Star Trek. Most breeze in and out in less than two minutes without having so much as paused their podcasts. Two red-shirted Eatsa employees mill around, awaiting questions that never come.

Eatsa debuted in 2015 with a menu of customizable quinoa bowls, in flavors like No Worry Curry and Hummus & Falafel, and has since expanded into soups, noodles, and salads at some of its seven locations. The concept is a 21st-century automat. Orders are placed in advance through the store’s app or tapped into a kiosk on-site but cannot be dictated to an actual human. Cash is not accepted. Utensils and napkins emerge through holes in the wall. It’s hard not to walk away feeling a certain electric sensation of having met the future head-on, like your first time cruising through an E-ZPass lane and wondering whether human beings are, at last, on the verge of obsolescence.