Eatsa

Sometimes one dines for pleasure, sometimes for sustenance, and sometimes because one is the world's foremost (?) expert on the Automat. Thursday, lunchtime, was an example of this last. Eatsa has opened just down the street from my offices in San Francisco, a new concept, and currently the sole American contender for the Automat mantle (New York's BAMN! having met its reportedly deserved fate). On the face of it, the two have much in common. The restaurant is very flash and self-consciously hypermodern, both inside and out...

And, like the Automats of yore, the concept is fully self-service: you order, either via mobile app or at one of a bank of iPads...

And then wait for your name to appear on one of the screens above a bank of blank boxes...

The cell identified as yours then blacks out and teases you with an announcement that the food is about to arrive...

And, when the black face clears, there it is, an invitation to open the window (tap twice on the screen to do so) and, behind it, your food, ready to go...

Finally, like the debut Automat in New York City, this first Eatsa has been met with curious crowds...

So much so that the line just to order was, for this author on his lunch break, much too long...

So, having taken my photos, I went to dine at a nearby cheesesteak shop which, to my delight, offered Philadelphia-authentic whiz...

And, unlike its new competitor, was able to serve this delicious boat of a sandwich in five minutes, while providing ample seating and a pleasant face-to-face encounter.

Indeed, of the two restaurants, the oh-so-of-the-moment Eatsa and the timeless sandwich shop, it is the latter that shares the Automat's spirit. It offers human contact in the person of a modern day nicklethrower, a large menu of popular options (Eatsa, bizarrely, serves only bowls of quinoa), seating and condiments shared communally, an efficient but unhurried experience, and is, by San Francisco standards, a good deal. Eatsa, though "automatic," is recreating a waiterless experience the world largely abandoned in the late 1800s (Horn and Hardart's Automats vended pre-plated food; it was the earlier, primarily European restaurants that only prepared food in response to a customer's signal and then hoisted it up in a dumbwaiter to the waiting gourmand, and these restaurants, unlike Eatsa, had a technological solution in place that guaranteed that the dish so prepared could be secured only by the person who ordered it), is using not an automat with its temperature-controlled cells but a primitive holding chamber to pass food from the invisible preparer to the diner, and is not actually a restaurant as it offers (almost) no place to dine. Eatsa is not an Automat, it is just a particularly inefficient vending machine.

Ray Kroc, the man behind McDonald's, commented many decades ago:

Hell, if I listened to the computers and did what they proposed with McDonald's, I'd have a store with a row of vending machines in it. You'd push some buttons and out would come your Big Mac, shake, and fries, all prepared automatically. We could do that.... But we never will. McDonald's is a people business, and the smile on that counter girl's face when she takes your order is a vital part of our image.

Here in San Francisco we spend a lot of time listening to computers, but like most people most places in most times, when we go out to eat we seek sustenance in a smile.