When a customer orders kung pow chicken at the new iWok restaurant by the Texas Medical Center, a robotic system sends small white bowls of pre-cut ingredients to sit next to an electric wok. A metal gripper dumps in the trays, and the wok starts to spin, making the meat inside look like nothing more than shirts tumbling about in a washing machine, except that it browns with each rotation.
This process of automated cooking is the main attraction at iWok, a fast-casual Asian fusion restaurant that officially opens Jan. 30. It’s located at 2328 W. Holcombe Blvd. but isn’t planning to stay in just one place for long: CEO Michael Ma intends to open branches of the brand-new concept in Asiatown, Katy and near the Johnson Space Center by the end of March.
This isn’t Houston’s first automated restaurant. Some restaurants now deliver food to diners via robot. Robo Cafe in Katy offers mechanized boba, cotton candy and soft serve machines. The recently opened Snap-a-Box, also in Katy, operates with a very similar system to iWok’s: an automated work that heats and tumbles food by itself to recreate popular Chinese dishes.
iWok represents the latest addition to the trend. Aside from slicing the ingredients, its food is almost entirely robot-made: The automated system can send trays of ingredients from a fridge to the pan, add ingredients, dribble in cornstarch slurry and deposit cooked dishes in the plastic trays they’re served in. Even the restaurant’s boba is prepared by a separate swiveling robotic arm.
The restaurant is keeping its menu short with just 12 dishes so far, mostly Chinese American classics: orange chicken, Mongolian beef, mapo tofu. What sets it apart from most other fast-casual Asian spots, Ma argued, is that the food is made to order by the electric woks, rather than cooked in large batches and left to wait in a buffet.
This isn’t to say that the restaurant is staff-free. Four to five employees will be on hand at any time, Ma estimated, with four partners running the concept behind the scenes: Ma, chief marketing officer George Liu, chief operating officer Stark Liu and culinary director J.D. Yang. Nevertheless, without the need for a chef, Ma thinks his concept will be significantly easier to expand.
“We still need people to prep the food. We still need people to serve the food. We still need people to do customer service. But it solves the most important problem,” he said. “When you don’t have a chef, you can’t run the business.”
I can’t argue with that. Restaurants have long embraced technology as a way to cut costs – which is to say, reduce the number of human workers needed – from kiosks to using AI in drive-thrus, which have had mixed results, and now robot chefs. I assume this will be limited to fast-casual and similar restaurants, where there are no substitution options – even “hold the pickles” might be tricky here – and simple menus. At least for now, anyway. How well it works, well, Houston is a notoriously competitive market for restaurants, so we’ll see. I would definitely be interested in an update on this concept a year from now. None of the named locations are places I tend to frequent, so someone else will have to provide a first-hand report for me. Does this sound like something you’d want to try?
I should note, this was in draft for a little while, but seeing this recent story about a wayward robot delivery vehicle, which reminded me that we have had robot delivery vehicles in Houston for several years now, and I had totally forgotten they existed because I haven’t heard a thing about them since then. I haven’t seen one, that’s for sure. Did you remember that we had robot food delivery vehicles in Houston? Have you ever seen or used one?
Gross.
I am hoping that the robot will not give you bad food if it decides it doesn’t like you.
UH did have the little food delivery robots.