Robot restaurant Chennai-get served by Robo Waitress!

Robot restaurant is a recently launched theme restaurant in Chennai wherein 3 robot waitress will serve you the food. The restaurant opened a few months ago and has been quite popular. Because of reports of high crowd levels I didn't plan a visit so far. Recently with a school time friend in town and the day being monday, it made a perfect alibi to visit this unique restaurant in Chennai.

This post shares my findings and experience at the Robot Restaurant.

Note that this is not just a robot themed restaurant but has some working robots at duty, serving food. As we entered, we had to go to waiting room area and get our table number assigned. With table number assigned, we went upstairs and were guided to our table by the staff. (Yes, there're many human staff around).

Each table has a tablet, from which one can see the menu, select items and place their order. Robot restaurant serves lots of Chinese, Thai foods- not much South Indian options. Price for most items is upwards of Rs 250-300. A cup of lime juice costs Rs 70. I ordered a Singapore Veg Noodle, Gobi Manchurian and Raveesh ordered few non-veg items.

We could see the robots moving around. They move on a fixed track- noticed a metal strip under the carpet- and deliver food from kitchen to guest's table. The robot doesn't have any body movement- it only moves straight and can turn left or right. Once it brings the food to the table either guests have to take the food from Robot's plate or restaurant staff will do it for you. Robot says it has brought the food we needed and asks to be tapped on the hand once food is taken. Then it proceeds to kitchen.

Below: 3 Robo waitresses ready for action in front of the kitchen. Once food is ready, a staff keeps the food on robo's plate and keys in which table it should go to. Robo then moves on the pre-defined path till the designated table.

Restaurant interiors are dark and lots of radium art depicting robo theme don the walls.

When we ordered juice, it was served by human staff- my guess is this was due to the risk that tall glass may fall off from tray during robot movement.

Quantity was good, taste was great, so no complaints on the food. They kept arriving as and when we confirmed-time to serve was very less as well- but there was no crowd when we visited.

I had read the robot had proximity sensor- but when I went in front of it, expecting it to stop and request that I move aside, it didn't make any such thing and kept moving- either it trusted me completely to move away in time or it was happy to kill me or I didn't go close enough for proximity sensors to trigger.

Watch a video below that I made at the restaurant: [Watch on youtube here]


Food for two will easily cross Rs 1000 at Robot restaurant. Plan accordingly.

A dummy robot is kept near the entrance for photo op purposes.

Outside view of Robot Theme restaurant

Overall a great experience, not easy on pocket for frequent visits though. At this moment the restaurant with functional robots is fairly unique in India- not aware of a similar one elsewhere. At this moment these robots haven't really taken away human jobs- there're human staff at the restaurant to assist. But may be soon robots will evolve enough not to need human staff. What do you think?

Things that can be improved:

• Let the default quantity be 1. (Right now it is zero and we have to manually set it to 1 after clicking on the item. Defaulting to 1 will save a click.
• If possible display what is served, what is on its way and which one is still being prepared

Address: Semencherry, OMR, Chennai. (U turn after Shell petrol bunk, restaurant is closer to St Joseph entrance.

Other unique restaurants:  Dialogue in the dark, Express Avenue * Real Food on Killiney Road, SG * Bazaar at GRT Grand *