The long locking of the coronavirus will force New York City restaurant owners to pivot when they finally start welcoming customers – and some pivots will be sharper than others.
Stratis Morfogen, founder of Philippe Chow and co-founder of Brooklyn Chop House, prepares to open his new concept, the Brooklyn Dumpling Shop, in the East Village just before the COVID-19 hit.
500 square feet of space on St. Marks Place and First Avenue, a 24/7 operation featuring 32 types of dumplings including peanut butter and jam, matzo ball soup, and dumplings with vanilla ice cream, initially planned to offer Shack-style shack pickup counters and limited seating.
However, two weeks after being locked up, Morfogen changed almost everything. The shop – now scheduled to open in July – swears zero human interaction. Instead of servers behind the counter, customers will be greeted by an 11 foot high locker wall, which will contain steaming hot dumpling orders.
“When the restaurant reopens, no one will say,” Do you feel like Chinese or Italian tonight? “” Will, ‘Where do you feel safest?’
Restaurants planning summer reopening and reopening introduce masks and disposable menus, measure customer temperatures and pressure the city for more free time to serve outdoor visitors.
But in the case of the Brooklyn Dumpling Shop, hungry guests will get a high-tech experience that is lacking in human touch.
The front of the shop will be managed by a single greeter wearing face masks and gloves, of course, who will signal to customers through a device that can scan body temperature.
If a protector draws a red light instead of a green light, it could mean they have a fever – or maybe they are holding a cup of hot coffee. For the final decision, the greeter guides the customer to a wall unit that requires wrist temperature. If the second reading lands in the red zone, sorry, there are no dumplings, according to Morfogen.
Only two customers will be allowed to enter the store at one time (versus capacity 10 planned for the previous design). After logging in, customers who haven’t ordered from their cell phones can visit one of two self-ordered kiosks.
The kiosk is equipped with a heat sensing screen that can detect fingers and credit cards that hover over it and which do not need to be touched. After finishing waving fingers and credit cards on it, the customer finally faces the locker wall.
“Lockers change from red, when your order comes in, to yellow, which means two minutes, to green, when you scan the phone on the keypad, the locker opens, and you take your food and leave,” Morfogen said.
Cook placing orders in individual lockers, further limiting contact between the kitchen and customers. Lockers are also heated and hygienically disinfected, Morphogen noted.
What’s more, “this is very cost effective. You save three people every 24 hours. “
The Brooklyn Dumpling Shop may be more suitable for this installation than most restaurants. Even before the virus, the plan was to show off a giant stainless steel machine in the front window capable of removing 30,000 dumplings per hour.
“We call it the dumpling lab,” Morfogen said, with plans for the machine to supply future locations apart from the Eastern Village flagship. “I hope we need it!”
The automatic locker system, developed by Apex Supply Chain Technologies based in Chicago, is far from a vending machine, and costs about $ 100,000 depending on software options.
Chief Executive Mike Wills said the “scan-and-go” technology, which was first used at airports and water parks, will get an attraction with post-COVID restaurants.
However, such newfangled technology is still largely unfamiliar to most industry players, as is the idea of a zero-human restaurant interaction.
“This might happen but this is not a broad trend I’ve ever heard of,” said Andrew Rigie, executive director of the NYC Hospitality Alliance.
