Automat-style Brooklyn Dumping Shop starts 'touchless' dining May 19

An automat-style QSR, Brooklyn Dumpling Shop, will open on First Avenue in New York City's East Village May 19, a news release said.

The fully automated store created by Brooklyn Chop House Director of Operations Stratis Morfogen brings the Automat, first introduced in the early twentieth century, into the current restaurant landscape with improved technology and «zero human interaction» throughout the grab-and-go process. The food locker technology at the store comes from Ondo and is powered by Panasonic to provide guests with a safe way to retrieve their orders from temperature-controlled lockers at peak freshness.

«The Automat was single handedly the greatest fast food distribution equipment ever designed,» Morfogen said in the release. «The technology we've brought to Brooklyn Dumpling Shop is unlike anything seen before, which will allow us to create an Autoflow from a customer's cell phone, to our POS ordering kiosks, right to our lockers to bring quick serve restaurants into the 21st century. The pandemic delayed Brooklyn Dumpling Shop's opening by a year, but this was a concept I came up with in 2018. I'm so excited to see this dream become a reality, which has been three years in the making and will now be franchised all over the globe.»

The restaurant will also have a Dumpling Lab in the front window with the restaurant's dumpling-making machines on view. Customers can place orders on their phones or via one of the restaurant's POS kiosks. When orders are ready, customers get a text to retrieve their food from a marked, temperature-controlled locker that will open automatically once the customer scans a barcode. Lockers storing hot food will be red lit indicating it's 100 degrees, and chilled lockers will be blue lit and 28 degrees. Auburn lit lockers will indicate one's at room temperature.

Brooklyn Dumpling Shop will be open around the clock for takeout and delivery, with indoor dining available until midnight daily and outdoor seating always available. The QSR also offers a line of mail order products to customers across the United States and will have their dumplings in Walmart stores nationwide beginning in early August.

The chain has multi-unit deal signed for Connecticut and New Jersey, as well for a growth plan that is centered on the Northeastern U.S.

Source: Kiosk Marketplace