tangentalizingly delicious

Thursday May 25, 2006

I want to talk some more about the table-top touchscreen menus I briefly mentioned yesterday, because they’re one of those things I’ve invested probably too much mental processing over that really probably aren’t all that useful or profitable an idea. But I like them anyway, and I can always pretend that the future will make them feasible. Hooray for the future and it’s infinite resources!

So. You have your table. A standard two- or four-top restaurant table, but without a tablecloth or other covering, because that would obscure the menu system. Although I’ve just be stricken by the thought of having the menuing system in the tablecloth, but that’s a step further down the road so I’ll ignore it for the time being.

Back to the table. It is one, and the surface is robust enough to handle plates being put on it, and bored teenagers poking at it with knives, and bored children drooling on it, and sloppy people getting rib sauce all over it and hassled waitstaff clunking down piping-hot fajita plates and stuff. It’s solid, is what I’m getting at.

But underneath that surface, which is transparent (so as you can see this layer, naturally) you’ve got a pretty basic sort of desktop. I don’t really care about the operating system, what’s important is that it’s a windowing system of some sort (though it should probably be fairly secure from tampering, so maybe a custom window manager is appropriate). There are a few options in the screen, the primary one being a menu.

It’s your restaurant’s standard menu. You can flip pages, jump from appitizers to desserts without even caring that entrees exist. It has what is actually available on tap tonight, the specials, and any menu items that aren’t available don’t even show up. They’re just not there, so the wait staff doesn’t have to come back and say “oh, sorry, we’ve run out of that thing you wanted, would you care to settle for something else?”

If the table is ready for the bill, they can signal their server without having to wait to flag them down. If someone needs a fresh drink or decides they want fries, they can send the information. It is, in some ways, a little antisocial since interaction with the wait staff is reduced and really they just start bringing things over instead of dealing with the requests, but maybe for some people that’s good.

While waiting for food people can doodle, like some restaurants let them do now, but with their fingers and digital ink instead of crayons on brown paper. Maybe a selection of music choices for the table’s jukebox, if that’s your thing, or various games and other sources of between-course entertainment.

Maybe, and this is where things get especially crazy, maybe the kitchen is tied into the system and can provide status updates, sort of like a shipping company’s online presence.

200605251932: Order received
200605251935: Steak on grill
200605251942: Steak plated, ORDER UP

Of course, that sort of detail is likely too much of a pain in the ass for the already busy kitchen staff, and exposing that level of granularity to the customer is probably undesirable for all sorts of reasons.

The real point is to streamline communication. If the customer is a regular and has an account of some sort, or is using a credit card, maybe they can just clear the bill up whenever they want rather than waiting for the actual paper bill. They can make sure the order has gone in clearly and any disputes can be addressed at any point during the meal.

It should be pointed out, though it’s probably obvious, that I have practically zero restuarant experience. I did wash dishes for a couple of months when I was 13 or so, but it turns out that I can’t read a schedule very well and therefore got fired after not showing up for two weeks. Oops.

Anyway, having the system always available to customers lets them build a stronger relationship by storing their history with the restaurant. If the person is like me and wants to slowly work their way through a nearby or favoured establishment’s menu but has a horrible menu, their order history can be preserved. They can rank foods and based on what they like and don’t a recommendation system that caters a little more to them may be devised (though I am somewhat grim on the usefulness of modern recommendation systems).