Robot Burger Restaurant Headed to SoMa

The apocalypse is now: Robots are taking over the San Francisco food scene at a rapid rate. According to Tech Insider, startup Momentum Machines has plans to open a restaurant in SoMa using machines that fully automate burger-making.

According to a Craigslist ad, the restaurant will open at 680 Folsom St., and is looking for a "restaurant generalist," which one can only assume is code for "robot wrangler." Naturally the ad doesn't mention the legion of metallic workers, instead saying "This location will feature the world-premiere of our proprietary and remarkable new advances in technology that enable the automatic creation of impossibly delicious burgers at prices everyone can afford."

While a human will presumably still be responsible for some of the restaurant's tasks (someone still has to sweep the floor, after all), the metal line cooks are fully capable of creating a burger from scratch: slicing toppings, grilling the meat, assembling and packing the burgers, all on its own. The machines can even customize the burgers, including temperature, preferred condiments and patty size.

A burger made by robots. [Photo: Momentum Machines]

The team that created the robots includes firepower from NASA, Tesla and the former head of R&D from Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck.

San Franciscans have already embraced the first step in the direction of fully automated restaurants with the opening of eatsa, the automat that allows guests to completely bypass human interaction by ordering bowls of quinoa from an iPad and picking up their meal from a glass box.

Will robots steal our jobs? Or, will they simply offer San Francisco restaurateurs an answer to the increasingly staffing problem in this city? Realistically, burger creation is a vastly different skill than say, plating a delicate uni toast at Saison or even pouring a glass of water, but it's a step in that direction. Early reports say that the machines could replace two to three full-time line cooks, and save a restaurant up to $90,000 a year in training, salaries, and overhead costs.

No word yet on when exactly the robots will descend; stay tuned for more.