Digital Dining At Inamo

By Hazel Last edited 185 months ago
Digital Dining At Inamo
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We're proud of London's capacity for fine dining and innovations in eating out. Sushi on moving tracks, menus that are 85 per cent garlic, eat in the dark... and now interactive digital dining tables at Inamo.

This restaurant offers Oriental fusion on touch screen tables that allow you to browse images of dishes in real size (or close enough, depending on image resolution), place orders, look up local information and possibly even start up Instant Messenger with your dining companions so you can have minimal human interaction while maximising your virtual contact. While we salute efforts to enliven eating out, we foresee lots of unique situations at Inamo:

- frequent crashes - not the breaking of glassware but the bluescreen of death just as you finalise the tricky specifications for your post-prandial coffee

- 1,000 bowls of extraneous chips instead of 1 bowl for the dining companion who still hasn't quite mastered the double-click

- harrassed human serving staff - how the blinking flip are they supposed to keep those tables clean? There's always someone at the party who spills stuff - and are the staff going to be equipped with static free dusters and a steady supply of clean, dry motherboards for those little emergencies?

- IT support instead of waiters, recommending 'turning it off then turn it back on again' instead of the turbot. Also, ordering a Screwdriver from the bar will become a whole new kind of drinking / Tech Support game

- hilarious bill-dodging games by diners proclaiming they have found bugs infesting their tables

And so on. What next for dining out? Cook your own food?

Image courtesy of Simon Crubellier from the Londonist Flickr pool.

Last Updated 08 October 2008