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Artificial intelligence has come for the restaurant industry — and it’s got some pretty crazy ideas for your taste buds.
Rafi, a restaurant based in Sydney, Australia, is hosting an AI-generated pop-up restaurant named Luminary this week.
The theme behind the AI-generated restaurant is “the art of illumination” which includes a menu and interior decor inspired by the four elements: earth, water, air, and fire.
The concept of the pop-up — which is in part tech experiment and in part marketing stunt — comes from Stefanie Wee, a Perth-based hospitality professional who developed the restaurant’s theme using OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Canva’s text-to-image AI generator.
The restaurant came to fruition after Wee’s concept won a competition led by Applejack Hospitality, the restaurant group behind Rafi, to create Australia’s first AI-generated restaurant, Applejack told Insider.
Wee asked ChatGPT to “come up with a restaurant name and concept to open in Sydney, Australia that is experiential, high-end contemporary, and unique to the industry,” she told Insider over email. After the chatbot suggested a few ideas, she chose her favorite one.
From there, she used the chatbot to tease out specifics like the restaurant’s name, menu, and lighting decor, she said.
Once she developed the full concept, Wee said she used Canva’s AI tool to produce mock images of the restaurant for inspiration. From there, Wee’s AI concept was finessed, with culinary experts working on its menu and a media art studio polishing its decor, according to Luminary’s website.
The result? A restaurant decorated with “expert use of lighting, haze, and LED technology” and a lengthy food menu with dishes categorized based on the four elements.
The “water” menu contains seafood dishes like smoked king fish and scallop; the “earth” menu features vegetable plates like grilled zucchini and crispy eggplant; the “fire” menu includes a bioluminescent calamari and coral trout all grilled on a fire; and the “air” menu has desserts like coconut espuma and whipped chocolate mousse.
Luminary also serves cocktails based on each element, such as the “Ember Glow,” a fire-inspired drink that has Gospel Rye whiskey and smoked blood orange.
The restaurant’s interior design is decorated with plants hanging from the ceiling that look like seaweed and orange lights that resemble coral. Describing her experience at Luminary, one customer wrote that the restaurant played “psychedelic music” and was covered by a “haze” made with dry ice, which she said looked “almost dreamlike.”
Reviews for Luminary have been mixed, with one customer writing that the AI restaurant “restored my faith in humanity.”
Even Wee said that it was the human touches that made the restaurant concept come to life.
“The process really showed how much human intervention was needed — from refining the recipes and making them realistic,” Wee said.
This isn’t the first time the dining industry has used AI — be it for a marketing ploy or to make business more efficient.
Restaurants have been using robots as servers for a while, and fast food chains like McDonalds and Chipotle are using AI-powered voice bots to take orders at the drive-thru and over the phone.
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