My first experience of fully automated front-of-house dining

On a recent visit to Hokuriku, my family and I had our first experience of fully automated front-of-house dining. That is, while there were human staff cooking the food, we did not encounter even one staff member in our 90 minute visit to the restaurant. From the minute you walk in the door everything is done by automated systems - from check‑in and ordering to robot delivery and machine‑processed payment.

At this stage, we are well accustomed to the "haizen" robots - the trolley like food delivering robots. But checking-in electronically without been shown to a table by staff, was a first for us at a family restaurant. When you enter the restaurant, you punch the number of people in your party into a machine and it dispenses a ticket number. When the ticket number is called, it shows you on the same machine your table number and which table is yours on a floor map! 

Once seated, you order your food through a tablet. That is also something we have plenty of experience with as that is very common in our area of Japan in recent years. When the food is prepared the 'haizen' robot brings it to the table and you remove your food yourself and place it on the table. When the table was getting cluttered with empty plates, we put them on the robot trolley, and it brings them back to the kitchen. 

When we were leaving, we entered our table number into a payment machine by the front door and it showed us our bill. We paid with cash at a self-checkout register. We did hear some distant human calls of "arigatou gozaimasu" as we exited the building, but never once saw a staff member! I am sure these types of fully automated front-of-house dining experiences will become the norm in the not-too-distant future!