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Bytes Restaurant With Touchscreen Ordering
Bytes restaurant in Canterbury, England is a technological wonder in this city full of historic cathedrals. Bytes offers a sit-down restaurant with no waiters or waitresses. You order when you are ready - on touchscreen panels.
(Bytes restaurant self-service touchscreen ordering)
Entreprenuer Heath Clay enlisted the help of engineers David Russell and Mark Bate to build the hardware and software needed. Customers place orders on touchscreen panels, and the orders are routed through the restaurant. Orders for drinks go to the bar, orders for British-flavored concoctions like baked avocado with Stilton and walnuts and smoked salmon with local new potatoes and dill go to the kitchen.
Here's one feature that should appeal to children of all ages; free games replace the menu after the order is completed.
Well, that's one step to the automated restaurants foretold by none other than Edgar Rice Burroughs. In his 1912 story A Princess of Mars he writes:
Kantos Kan led me to one of these gorgeous eating places where we were served entirely by mechanical apparatus. No hand touched the food from the time it entered the building in its raw state until it emerged hot and delicious upon the tables before the guests, in response to the touching of tiny buttons to indicate their desires.
(Read more about automated restaurants)
Update 19-Nov-2025: The earliest science fictional example of a touchscreen menu will surprise you: the mirror menu from Caesar's Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century by Ignatius Donnelly, published in 1890:
As I took my seat my weight set some machinery in motion. A few feet in front of me suddenly rose out of the table a large upright mirror, or such I took it to be; but instantly there appeared on its surface a grand bill of fare, each article being numbered. The whole world had been ransacked to produce the viands named in it; neither the frozen recesses of the north nor the sweltering regions of the south had been spared: every form of food, animal and vegetable, bird, beast, reptile, fish; the foot of an elephant, the hump of a buffalo, the edible bird-nests of China; snails, spiders, shell-fish, the strange and luscious creatures lately found in the extreme depths of the ocean and fished for with dynamite; in fact, every form of food pleasant to the palate of man was there. For, as you know, there are men who make fortunes now by preserving and breeding the game animals, like the deer, the moose, the elk, the buffalo, the antelope, the mountain sheep and goat, and many others, which but for their care would long since have become extinct. They select barren regions in mild climates, not fit for agriculture, and enclosing large tracts with wire fences, they raise great quantities of these valuable game animals, which they sell to the wealthy gourmands of the great cities, at very high prices.I was perplexed, and, turning to the great man who stood near me, I began to name a few of the articles I wanted. He smiled complacently at my country ignorance, and called my attention to the fact that the table immediately before me contained hundreds of little knobs or buttons, each one numbered; and he told me that these were connected by electric wires with the kitchen of the hotel, and if I would observe the numbers attached to any articles in the bill of fare which I desired, and would touch the corresponding numbers of the knobs before me, my dinner would be ordered on a similar mirror in the kitchen, and speedily served. I did as he directed.
(Read more about the mirror menu)
End update.
Be sure to also read about the AIC-CI Cookingrobot Chinese Robotic Chef. Read more about the restaurant touchscreen ordering.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 10/15/2006)
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