Restaurant companies are making million-dollar bets that robots can be taught to cook.
The Wall Street Journal
It’s my first week on the job at Chez When, and I’m hoping I don’t blow it. It’s not the “million-dollar bet” that the owners are making on me as their first robot cook–I couldn’t care less about their money. It’s the prospect of having to go back to work on an auto assembly line if I screw up. Believe me, if I have to choose between slicing and dicing carrots and celery and spot-welding lug nuts onto one chassis after another all day long, I’m opting for the former.
Working in a kitchen has its drawbacks, of course. As you know if you watch “The Bear” on TV, it is apparently federal law that you have to say the word “motherf***er” with every breath when you work “back of the house” in a restaurant. And there’s always the chance that you’ll lose a knuckle or two–I’m told they won’t let you into the butchers union if you have more than nine fingers. And there’s the irregular hours; when I working at the Mazda plant at least I knew I’d get off work at five. Instead, I get stuck with a split shift; lunch from 11 to 2, then dinner from 4 to midnight. And they wonder why they have so much turnover.
I’m starting out as “sous-chef,” meaning I’m an understudy to Monsieur Gilles La Plat, the enfant terrible of Worcester, Mass. haute cuisine. He is notorious for burning through help like a prairie wildfire, even when the closest prairie is half a continent away.
“You–robot!” he shouts at me as I’m standing around, trying to look busy.
“Yes?”
“I need you to stuff the escargots into their shells!”
“Oui, monsieur!” I reply with bogus enthusiasm; I have my doubts as to whether my artificial hands have sufficient fine motor skills to pull off what common victualers consider to be one of the most difficult tasks in the dinner-prep routine, but I’ll give it my best shot.
I get one of the little buggers into his shell, apply some garlic butter paste to seal him in, Cask of Amontillado-style, and start to move on to the next one when I notice, coming through the swinging kitchen doors–the most bodacious-looking female robot I’ve ever seen.
I give her the once-over and the up-and-down; my guess is she’s got motion range for each robotic axis of +/-400 degrees. Of the various robot types, I think she’s articulated–and how. Her repeatability has got to be +/-0.08 mm, if not, it’s a silly millimeter short of that. In short, quite the babe.
I give her my most natural-looking smile, but it doesn’t impress her. She’s too busy charming the pants off the male humanoids in the “front of the house.” I can sense what the problem is; she’s aristocracy, I’m one step above the busboy.
“I need one sole meunière and one noisettes de porc.”
“Eighty-six on the noisettes,” the chef says, using traditional restaurant slang to inform her we’re out of that item. “Try to substitute some escargots.”
She gives me a withering look, but I hold out my handiwork; five re-usable shells–fresh from the dishwasher–stuffed with the finest canned snails this side of Le Bocage in Watertown.
“Who would agree to that swap,” she says, curling up her nose at my little garlicky buddies. “They are like slimy gobs of snot.”
“They’re actually not bad,” I say, holding one out for her to try. “Have a slurp.”
She takes a shell gingerly from my tray, and slides the little gastropod down her throat.
“What do you think?”
“It is . . . passable.”
“Okay–now we get a sample of snot from . . . how about the plongeur?“
“He’s disgusting.”
“We’ll just take a sample off his sleeve.” I amble over and chat up the young fellow, a post-adolescent, post-bachelor degree type who has yet to “find himself,” in the vogue phrase of the young.
“Excuse me–can I borrow some of your snot?”
“What for?” he asks.
“I’m doing a test with the lady robot here, uh . . . what’s your name?”
“Seraphina Byte.”
“Sure–take all you want.”
I scrape a sample off his left arm and offer it to her. “Okay,” she says. “I agree, the snail is better. But if you added garlic to the booger . . .”
“Don’t think so. You know the poem, right?”
“I did not know you were un poete,” she says, finally beginning to warm up to me now that she knows I have hidden depths. “How does it go?”
“Everybody’s doin’ it, doin’ it, doin’ it,
pickin’ their nose and chewin’ it, chewin’ it–
They think it’s candy but it’s snot.”