Robot Waiters Are Serving Customers In Netherlands Restaurant For Social Distancing

As if the year 2020 isn’t unpredictable enough, creepy robot waiters have actually become a thing now and they’re serving customers in a town called Renesse.

Restaurants in the Netherlands have been closed for months now, but are beginning to reopen with special limitations, such as the number of guests allowed. Upon reopening, the Royal Palace restaurant in Renesse, Netherlands decided to introduce robot waiters as a way to reduce human to human contact. The red-and-white robots greet customers by saying “hello and welcome”, serve food, and pick up used dishes. While the robots can successfully complete these tasks, they will not replace humans.

“They help us with the work we do,” says Leah Hu, whose family owns the Royal Palace. “We are often busy and cleaning tables and the robots give us an extra hand. We are not disappearing. We are still here. They will always need people in this industry.”

As cool as this whole robot idea is, it is not all that new. In fact, robot waiters have been quite common in China for a few years now. Will we see robot waiters in the US as well? Well, considering how rough the past few months have been in the food industry because of the pandemic, we would say it’s quite unlikely that we will see these expensive robots in US eateries any time soon.