Chennai's first robot restaurant has no reservations, literally!

When we say that Chennai’s first robot restaurant has no reservations, we’re being quite literal
Robot
Robot

Plenty of people who call ahead to make a reservation at Robot ask the chaps handling the phone how to spot the place when you're speeding down OMR, provided you're not blockaded in by rush-hour IT corridor traffic. I know I did. While I was patiently given directions to the month-and-something-old restaurant, perhaps it might have been more prudent on their part to say 'Look for the mob outside. Park. Fight your way in'.

You'd be hard-pressed to find Michelin star restaurants who are as booked out as Robot. I kid you not. That's how psyched people are to check out what is billed as India's first robotic restaurant (by which we mean that the food is brought by waiters and not that the whole space is a transformer that switches form at 1, 4, 7 and 10 pm). 

"We opened in end November and within 4 days we were booked until December 27. It was just ridiculous. After a point, we got tired of explaining to people that we were booked for a month and not just a few days," a bemused Karthik Kannan tells us. Kannan is the co-owner of the restaurant and looks suitably harassed by the influx of diners. Ironically, it's only 7.30 pm on a Thursday night. "It's usually worse," he mouths to us in passing, as he steers a large group to the only table that was currently free in the 72-seat restaurant. 

Predictably, the group took a while to get to their table as they spotted two of the white-and-blue robot waiters trundling out of the kitchen and across the table. Within seconds, the phones are out and the robot becomes the subject of twenty-odd rapidly clicked selfies. Clearly, this is a recurrent issue as two of the non-electronic waiters quickly jump to their Chinese counterparts' rescue, "Please don't hold up the robots. They need to give food to other tables," with the practiced ease that most zookeepers have while telling kids not to feed the lions. 

Brought in from China, the land where there are over a thousand of these robot restaurants, at this point in time all the robots can do is move around a pre-programmed track that links every table to the kitchen. You order on a tablet and the (human) chefs toss up some garden variety Chinese and Thai food and pop the order on to the waiting platter of a robot waiter, who then rolls up to your table ever-so-slowly. A human waiter, possibly India's first robot-waiter-assistant, jumps out and pops plates of momos and fried rice on to your table. 

Exciting much? People seem to think so. And they find the bots much more enticing than the food, at times. "It can get a little infuriating at times," concedes Kannan, "Whole families of five and six come in and order just one dessert or lime juice. They take up space at a time when people are waiting outside for ages," he fumes. Understandably, he comped the lime juice order in frustration but didn't have too much time to worry because the war to sift through the crowd and allocate the table is already underway.  

The clock ticks past 8 pm. Kannan, who is trying his best to wangle a table for us, suggests we hoof it outside where the crowd is thinner and the air is fresher. We take his advice because the dark interiors, luminous paintings of robots and that familiar smell of Indo-Chinese food was beginning to get stifling. The crowd in the waiting area outside has grown exponentially and some of them are making use of their time by checking-in on FB and getting their pre-robot selfies sorted. Others just look plain hungry, "We feel really bad having to refuse about 200 callers and walk-ins every day but we simply can't handle it," he says apologetically. 

We believe him. Heck, looking at that crowd outside, I wouldn't want to be him — at least for a couple of months. Glancing through the menu, it's immediately apparent that the excess innovation they've put into Robot and their other airplane-themed restaurant 747, hasn't really gone into the menu. It's Chinese. It's Thai. It's OMR pricey. It's functional. So when the crowd still stands between us and a table at 8.30 pm, we decide that this is a battle that will have to be won another day. Hopefully, the robots will survive their bouts with selfies and gravies till then.

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