Restaurants incorporate robot chef to take over monotonous kitchen duties
Last year, restaurateur Cui Runguan made headlines when news broke that he found the world’s most perfect employee: one that never complains, is always on time, and is willing to work for half the salary of its human equal.
Cui Runguan’s noodle slicing robot.
“Chef Cui,” as the robot is called, can do one task and one task only: slice noodles. The good news, though, is that despite its limitations, it is extremely efficient in its single capability, slicing noodles from a block of dough better, faster, and more efficiently than any human chef.
The Chef Cui robot is an efficient alternative to human chefs having to slice noodles.
In traditional Chinese noodle restaurants, a chef is often assigned the repetitive and monotonous task of slicing noodles. Not only is the job boring, it’s also tiring. As a result, there are not many young people out there itching to get in the kitchen.
“As there are more and more job opportunities, the young people don’t want to work as chef to slice noodles, because this job is very exhausting,” Runguan explains. “It is the trend that robots will replace men in factories, it is certainly going to happen in sliced-noodle restaurants.”
So Runguan came up with the idea of bringing in a robot to perform the duty. Chef Cui stands over a pot of boiling water and continuously slices noodles with an up-and-down windshield wiper-like motion. If need be, it can go at it all day long.
Chef Cui uses an up-and-down windshield wiping motion to cut noodles.
His idea quickly caught on and numerous restaurants contacted Runguan about it. Today, there are over 3,000 robots being used by restaurants in Beijing. And where a chef would cost the restaurant $4,700 a year, restaurant owners need only pay the one-time fee of $2,000 to bring in this expert noodle dicer.
Over 3,000 Chef Cui robots are already employed by Beijing-based noodle restaurants.
Perhaps most noteworthy is that diners are satisfied with the results, saying that the robot-made noodles are as good as — if not better than — home-made noodles.
Check out Chef Cui in action below:
Story via: eater.com
■
Advertisement
Learn more about Electronic Products Magazine
