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Restaurants and robots: Don’t be alarmed

Posted on21/10/202230/11/2022Author

So much of the recent news about robots in restaurants has focused on the kitchen, where experts seek to engineer the perfect automated pizza maker or a robotic fry station attendant. While the jury’s still out on whether these devices could ever demonstrate the dexterity humans have for making food taste good, they seem more approachable for many restaurant operators than service robots. Even so, the launch of these tools is often marked with headlines like “Attack of the pizza making robots” and “The robots are here,” as if we’re facing an alien invasion!

If you’ve ever been served by a robot in the front of a restaurant, it can be rather surprising at first. For customers and staff alike, the presence of these automated workers can set off alarm bells. Customers might worry the lack of human interaction will ruin their experience or result in unnecessary mistakes. For employees, robots might incite fears of being replaced.

The ultimate helping hand, robots are uniquely positioned to support restaurants through the current wave of labor shortages and inflated food costs — that is, if they’re introduced and used correctly.

Relieve, not replace

To ensure robots become an ally to service staff, it’s important to set expectations about what these automated co-workers can and can’t do. They are best utilized to perform physical, repetitive, and manually straining tasks, thus relieving staff from these duties. For example, they can carry multiple hot pots out of the kitchen and bring them to guests, avoiding painful, costly spills along the way. They can help servers clear the entire dining room in one quick trip. They can even wash the floors before, after and during a shift.

All these routine tasks, when handed off to a robot, free up front-of-house employees to do the more important tasks that require interaction with guests, like recommending the right dish, making a memorable conversation or fulfilling a more specific ask. Servers have more time to engage with guests, check in on their tables, and generally ensure an excellent dining experience when accompanied by a robot. The key word is accompanied. Make sure employees know the bot is there to support them, not replace them.

Not only will the robots work alongside servers, but in time, this collaboration will also result in servers on duty taking home a higher percentage in tips — robots don’t need to be paid. By delivering food, cleaning and serving, robots ensure workers are less overworked and less physically taxed while being paid the same, or perhaps even more than before.

Enhancing the experience

Robots can be a marketing tactic for many restaurants, as some diners will seek out this novel dining experience. However, for more particular customers expecting a traditional service, robots can seem like the end of a golden age of dining. It will be important robots follow the established rules of restaurant service and enhance the experience without taking anything, including familiarity, away.

Robots should avoid hitting guests. This may seem obvious but from a technical standpoint it is actually one of the harder parts about introducing robotics. Advanced AI is required in order to realize intelligent delivery in restaurant scenarios. The positioning technology must be effective to navigate dining rooms with multiple walkways and several dozen guests. New vision-based robot localization and mapping technology allows some restaurant bots to find their way without markers, making them much easier to deploy, especially in high ceiling environments. Adaptability in all scenarios, like recognizing and slowing down for elderly guests and children, is also critical to ensure customers feel comfortable around robots.

Not only does advanced positioning technology reduce the risk of collisions, but it also increases the likelihood of robots bringing the right food to the right table. Few things annoy a guest more than waiting for food only to have it be the wrong dish, or having it spill on the way out of the kitchen. Robots can build trust with guests by consistently performing as they’re intended.

Bots come in all shapes and sizes with a unique variety of capabilities. For restaurants, it’s as important for the robots to be aesthetically pleasing as it is for the carefully designed dining room. A terminator-looking bot is probably not going to put guests at ease. But something cute and cleanly designed will make guests feel comfortable and entertained. Taking this a step further, advanced robots can also be engaging, welcoming customers with greetings, telling jokes and providing voice or emoji feedback. While they’ll never replace a human in terms of engagement, robots can appear more approachable with these small touches.

To ensure an exceptional experience for both staff and

The Creole Cocktail, an Early Manhattan Variation, Made Modern

Posted on18/10/202230/11/2022Author

The Creole Cocktail is not the most famous drink to come out of New Orleans—probably because, despite the name, it didn’t originate there at all. “I’ve never really treated that cocktail as part of the New Orleans canon,” says Neal Bodenheimer, author of Cure: New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ‘Em. “The Creole Cocktail,” he notes, “was an ode to New Orleans by an outsider.” That outsider was Hugo Ensslin, a German immigrant to New York whose relative obscurity during his lifetime failed to presage the legacy of his self-published Recipes for Mixed Drinks.

Originally a stirred, equal-parts mixture of rye and sweet vermouth with small measures of Bénédictine and Amer Picon, plus a lemon twist, the Creole Cocktail reflects both its birthplace—New York—as well as the city that inspired it. It is, in essence, a modified Manhattan in the style of that drink’s earliest decades, before it became more whiskey-forward and ditched the liqueurs and syrups. One could speculate that the French origin of both of the Creole Cocktail’s supporting liqueurs is the reason for the nod to New Orleans.

When Ben Hatch was beverage director at The Elysian Bar in New Orleans’ Hotel Peter and Paul, he was on the hunt for a lesser-known template associated with the city that he could make his own. One of the bartenders on staff told him about the Creole Cocktail, describing it as a cross between an Old-Fashioned and a Manhattan. Hatch was intrigued.

The recipe development process begins with one of Hatch’s favorite American whiskeys: Stellum Rye. He describes the barrel-proof expression as having a silky mouthfeel with “amped up” spice notes. Because his aim was to showcase the rye, he opted for a stepped ratio that departs from the original, with rye in the top slot at one and a half ounces, followed by an ounce of vermouth, a half-ounce of one liqueur and just a quarter-ounce of the next.

For the vermouth, Hatch wanted something super light, so as not to distract from the rye. He reached for Bèrto Ross da Travaj, a Piedmontese vermouth that, he notes, isn’t too “inky” (sweet, heavy and vanilla-forward), but has a subtle herbaceous profile.

The choice of the first liqueur felt obvious to Hatch. Amer Picon was not available in the US, but he knew he wanted to use a similar product. The China-China Bigallet is a common substitution for Picon, as it has the original ABV of the pre-Prohibition French digestif (40 percent) and similarly features a classic bitter orange profile with spice and vegetal notes.

When it came to choosing the second liqueur, Hatch, an amaro fanatic, forwent the Bénédictine and worked an Italian digestivo into the recipe—a choice that makes sense considering the influence Italian culture had in New Orleans. After some deliberation, he settled on Amaro Lys, from the Valle d’Aosta producer Alpe. “I like the heathered honey notes that Bénédictine has, but I think those are showcased better in this amaro,” he explains. Hatch also appreciates the amaro’s dried Alpine herb notes, gentian-forward bitterness and what he describes as “chew”—referring to the product’s pleasant combination of viscosity and bitterness. To finish the drink, Hatch serves it up with an orange twist, rather than the brighter lemon called for in the original recipe.

What began as a quest to find a spirit-forward New Orleans drink beyond the expected Sazerac or Vieux Carré ended up becoming an ode to Hatch’s favorite Alpine producers, resulting in a drink with a deep sense of terroir, effectively taking the drinker on a virtual trip from the French Alps, near Grenoble, through Torino and up to the Valle d’Aosta.

Hatch’s Creole Cocktail makes the case that authenticity of origin isn’t a prerequisite for entry into the New Orleans canon. The bitter, Alpine take on the northern drink reflects many changes to cocktail culture that have come down in the century since it was born, including an emphasis on the base spirit in Manhattan-style drinks, as well as the outsize influence of amaro.

Though some may see this interpretation of the Creole Cocktail as an ideal cold-weather nightcap (and it is), Hatch says that, in a town where Sazeracs are a perennial standard, this drink sells well year-round. “New Orleans is such a boozy town that people aren’t afraid to pull up a bar stool when it’s 110 degrees outside,” he says. “They order a very spirit-forward cocktail like this and enjoy it just as much.”

Baird downgrades Darden Restaurants as macro risks lingering

Posted on26/09/202230/11/2022Author