I like
hamburgers. Sure, they're
junk food,
bad for you et cetera. But I still
love the
taste of a
good burger.
Of course, not every
joint serves high quality stuff. But if the regular
fast food places don't
satisfy you, it's possible to make
delicious burgers yourself.
Apart from the taste, I also enjoy the
versatility. Hamburgers can have a nearly
unlimited amount of
ingredient combinations in them, which allows for
fun experimenting when making them at home.
A couple of months ago I was eating at
Carrols. The burger tasted
nice, but had
pickled cucumbers in it. If you have seen
my rant on raisins and cucumbers, you know I'm not a big fan of them.
I
could have asked for the "
cook" to make me a hamburger without the cucumber, but I still would have paid the same amount of
money for it. This is when I came up with the idea of a new kind of
Hamburger Restaurant.
First of all, this place would not just be an another
McDonald's franchise. I'm talking about a
real restaurant with
tables,
waiters,
the whole enchilada. Dressing up
casually would be acceptable though.
Every table would include a small
computer terminal.
It would contain an easy-to-use piece of
software, used by the
customer to
customize his/her hamburger, or to build one
from scratch. The ingedients (with their amounts and order) would be selected from a (long enough) list, along with the preferred
drinks,
fries etc. The
price would be defined by the ingredients, so the customers could watch the
cost forming while they add things to the
mix.
Of course, the restaurant would offer its own
recipes to the
busy or less
adventurous people.
After the
designing is complete, the
order would be sent to the
kitchen, where
skilled chefs would
prepare the
meal.
While waiting for the
order, the customers could for example check out
E2 or
/. on the terminals, which are naturally
connected to the
Internet and running an
open source OS in order to keep the potential
MS basher customers satisfied.
:)
Extended
services might include the ability for regular customers to
store their
favorite hamburger recipes on the
network, allowing others to
browse them aswell. With multiple restaurants communicating through the '
net, this could be used to create
a worldwide customer recipe database.
I wonder if this
idea could
work in
reality.
Demand is of course the
key factor. So much "
interactivity" might be frightening (not to mention too
time-consuming) to people not
confortable with
technology. So the restaurant would probably be filled with
geeks like myself. This is not necessarily a
bad thing, but I'm not sure if there would be enough of us to keep the
enterprise profitable.
The
selection of different ingredients (from
buns to
sauces) would need to big enough to offer true versatility. This calls for the
storaging of various different
food items at all times, and what if the
lobster burgers don't suddenly sell as well as they recently did?
Of course, It's
possible there could already be a business like this somewhere. But if not, every
entrepeneur in E2 is
welcome to
steal my idea. Just invite me to the
grand opening.
Update - April 10, 2002
mkb informs me that a chain somewhat like this does exists, and it's D.P. Dough. So, I guess my radical ideas on hi-tech hamburger restaurants have already occurred to others.