Robot-Made Burgers Wow The Crowds In San Francisco
Fad Or The Future? Robot-Made Burgers Wow The Crowds In
San Francisco
By ANNA MANTZARIS August 24, 2018 8:02 AM ET
Alex Vardakostas had a dream about creating a robot
burger-maker in college. He's now poised to open a restaurant with his Creator
Burger robot in September.
An audience gathers around the transparent 14-foot-long
"culinary instrument" in a restaurant called Creator in San
Francisco's SoMa neighborhood.
Brioche buns are sliced, buttered and toasted by paddles
moving like waves in the ocean. They land in specially designed, compostable
hamburger boxes. The buns are topped with fresh produce, sourced from local
farms, which is sliced on the spot. Cheese is shredded from blocks and added.
The in-machine meat grinder has been calibrated to vertically align the meat
with diner's incisors. The 4.5-ounce beef patties are ground from brisket and
cooked using the induction method, both sides at once, then slid into the
boxes.
And the fumes from cooking? They are cleaned inside the
machine.
The sleek hamburger-producing machine, featuring organic
curves and copper detail, fits in perfectly with Creator's airy 2,200
square-foot space, white walls and high ceiling. It attracted a waitlist this
summer for its bi-weekly lunches, and will open full time in September. It fits
with the city as well — the restaurant is just two miles away from where the
Elon Musk-founded OpenAI lab recently tested a robot hand named Dactyl.
A Creator Burger fresh out of the robot that toasted the
buns, sliced the produce, shredded the cheese, and cooked the beef.
Saroyan Humphrey
Creator's parent company is a culinary robotics firm
founded by 33-year-old Alex Vardakostas, who grew up in the burger business in
Southern California. "I really got going on the griddle when I was like
14, 15," says Vardakostas, whose family owns the two Orange County A's
Burgers locations.
The inspiration struck Vardakostas while he was a junior
at the University of California, Santa Barbara, studying physics. He woke up at
4 a.m. with the idea for a robot-made burger. "A lot of people don't talk
about this or realize it, but it is incredibly unhealthy — inhaling
grease-laden vapors and soot all day. So that was this really exciting idea for
me, where I could just have this beautiful instrument and I could take control
of it," says Vardakostas. (The World Health Organization has identified a
number of hazardous compounds released into the air by cooking, and while many
oven hoods in commercial and residential kitchens filter some of the bad stuff
out, some do a better job than others.)
Since then, Vardakostas has focused on creating a
healthier work environment and developing a better way to make high-quality
food at a reasonable price. Four years after he had his bot-burger vision, he
built his first hamburger-making robot in his childhood garage. "I would
drive up to Menlo Park and get machine parts at TechShop and drive all the way
back down to Orange County and hope they fit together and try to make it
work," he says.
A move to San Francisco and a collaboration with
32-year-old Steve Frehn, now Creator's co-founder and COO, led to the second
rendition of the burger machine. Now on version four, the machine, comprised of
food-safe plastic tubes and over 350 sensors run by software and 20 computers,
is fully operational. It is stocked with carefully sourced produce, bread and
meat.
David Bordow, 32, culinary lead and experience designer,
emphasizes the importance of quality and carefully chosen seasonal ingredients.
"The philosophy is, 'Let's find the best stuff that is available,' "
he says. The beef is antibiotic and hormone-free, sourced from Country Natural
Beef, a family ranch owned co-op.
At Creator, there's more to the staff than just a robot.
All burger sides are human-made. The obligatory fries are on the menu, along
with seasonal salads and vegetables.
There are currently four kinds of burgers, including the
Tumami, created by Top Chef's Tu David Phu, which features an oyster aioli and
shiitake mushroom sauce.
Eventually, customers will get to control how much sauce
and seasonings they want the robot to add. "The nice thing about using a
machine is that it's very precise, so if someone has a sodium limit, or
something like that, we can track that sort of thing and provide a little
customization," says Frehn.
In a city of pricy boba drinks and marked up avocado
toast, Vardakostas says Creator's mission is to improve food quality and make
it accessible. Burgers are $6. "We want everyone to be able to
partake," he says.
Word is spreading. Los Angeles-based high school student
Moses Rosales heard about Creator on YouTube and convinced his mom and aunt to
dine there during a two-day trip to the Bay Area. "It was amazing to see
how a robot made a burger," Rosales says. "I didn't know how far you
could go with it. Now I'm seeing it's a really high-end burger."
For now, Creator is the only home to two burger-making
robotic machines, although Frehn says they hope to expand.
On the ground floor of the San Francisco building that's
also home to offices for Microsoft and Riverbed, approximately 10 Creator
staffers worked the soft-launch lunch shift this summer. Employees, who start
at $16 an hour, are allowed to spend 5 percent of their time on the clock
reading or learning a new skill. Bookstore-style "staff picks" fill
the three bookshelves, with titles including Alice Waters' The Art of Simple
Food and Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma.
Creator is focused on the service and culinary side of
the business, too. "We've been pretty firm about not having an automated
ordering process, with kiosks or something like that," says Vardakostas.
"So we have people, and that costs us money. But at the end of the day,
that makes for a better guest experience and it's a more human-centered
restaurant."
Creator is not the only restaurant to feature a
food-making robot while also making an effort to retain its humanity. Cafe X
has three San Francisco locations. Each features a robotic coffee-making arm
that can produce drinks in 30 to 40 seconds. Customers retrieve their beverages
by punching in a texted code sent to their phone.
Opal Franklin, a recent college grad working at the
Market Street Cafe X location, walks the small space on a Friday afternoon. She
offers customers and curiosity-seekers oat milk samples before explaining,
"Often times people say that we take away barista jobs, but we in a sense
shift the job. The robot is very precise and it's very practical, so we have a
product specialist on site to answer questions and help people out and make it
more humanistic."
While still in their early days, culinary robots are
starting to pop up beyond San Francisco. In nearby Silicon Valley, Zume Pizza
delivers pies pressed by a "Doughbot" in nine seconds. Across the
pond in Paris, startup Ekim has created a three-armed robot that makes pizzas
from start to finish. On the East Coast, four MIT grads opened Spyce in Boston
in May, which features robotic tumbling woks that create customized bowls,
under the culinary direction of renowned French chef and restaurateur Daniel
Boulud.
While the culinary robotics show at Creator wows, this
isn't a novelty to the team. "We put a lot of care and effort into making
sure this would have a positive effect on consumers," says Frehn.
"And we worked to create a better retail job as well."
Anna Mantzaris is a San Francisco-based writer.
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