I Ate at an AI Restaurant

I ate at an AI restaurant.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, you’ve noticed that more and more businesses have been utilizing AI generated imagery to advertise. AI generated signs with wobbly looking text, AI generated pictures of strange, bastardized anime mascots, and the weirdest one of all: AI generated pictures of food.

All of these might look normal if you just take a glance at it, or if you aren’t familiar with basic graphic design. But if you look closely, you’ll notice that things look a little too strange. The cheeseburgers have shiny plasticky yellow slabs that stretch and meld onto brown squiggles that make up the form of a burger. The chicken wings have multiple bones warping out of a lump of orange meat with strange sesame seed-looking toppings. The salad contains every vegetable in existence pouring into a bowl where chunks of ranch spill off onto the side of a perfectly smooth whole tomato that merges into a vine of broccoli.

There was one particular restaurant that popped up in my town that bragged about their “AI food”. Instead of pretending they designed everything themselves, they seemed to have embraced the AI slop. I almost respected it. The food in the advertisements in front had that crude, cartoony and all too shiny look to it. Completely unappetizing. Their tagline underneath was “Better than human made!”

Ridiculous. There was no way in hell that the food looks anything like what the pictures show. I’ve seen posts online when someone orders something that had AI generated pictures. They always get the real deal and it’s always some crappy poorly made thing. The fact that this restaurant bragged about being better than human made food was flat out arrogant. I wanted to prove that this place, who wholly embraced generative AI, was the same as the others: some cheap company churning out poorly made, gross products using fake computer images to hide it.

I marched through the door, where it chimed my arrival. I studied the room, which contained neon orange walls and lemon-yellow carpeted flooring. On those neon orange walls were numerous menus, which contained hundreds of items. I swear to God it put the Cheesecake Factory’s menu to shame. Next to each item was one of those disgusting AI generated images. The text was clearly AI as well, written in a font that nearly blended the words together.

I looked at the opposite side of the restaurant, where giant touch screen kiosks were lined up, next to a hole in the wall, where the food ostensibly came out of. There were no workers present, at least not what I could see. And no customers either. I felt gross stuffing my money into the machine. But I wanted to prove that these AI restaurants were a disgusting waste of money and time.

I selected the basic cheeseburger. The picture contained what looked like 4 pieces of smooth and shiny, wet cheese slices melting onto squiggly burger meat, where suspicious red vegetables squeaked out from the sides. If you squinted, I supposed they were supposed to be tomatoes. A mysterious, yellow-transparent sauce leaked down the bun. It looked absolutely vile.

I selected “order” and waited for my meal. I made sure to get a picture of the AI monstrosity. I had to see what grey piece of meat slid out from the order window. It was going to be hilarious. There was no way this matched the picture in any capacity. I waited, and two minutes later a bright green tray slid out with a perfectly wrapped burger. I attempted to look through the service hole, trying to get a peak of whoever was making the food. But the slot closed immediately after the food came out, and I was unable to look at the other side.

I took the tray and moved to one of the tables against the wall. The wrapper had a picture of that same burger that I saw on the touch screen. I laughed and rolled my eyes. I couldn’t wait to see what this thing looked like.

I attempted to unwrap the sandwich, where I had strangely had some trouble. I wasn’t sure how to grab it. I’ve unwrapped plenty of burgers before, I wasn’t an idiot. But the wrapper itself seemed to have different sections to it, like it was three separate pieces of paper wrapped at separate times, tangling into one mass. I tugged upwards and it peeled off the burger with extreme ease. I could have sworn it went through the burger itself. I would have put more thought into the mechanics of this stupid piece of paper, but I became immediately distracted by my food.

The burger looked exactly like the picture.

I was absolutely dumbfounded. These guys actually made their food look just like the pictures. I wondered if the taste was going to save it.

I wrapped my hands around the buns, where my fingers sank into soft and spongey bread. The texture felt… off. Like I was pushing my hands into a mattress. When I pulled the burger upwards towards my mouth, the cheese began to melt and dribble down my fingers, where chunks of yellow goop slapped onto the tray below. The piles of cheese operated like some sort of greasy liquid. The physics were all off. I observed the piles of melted cheese below, where it bubbled and swayed back and forth like Jello.

I took a bite of the burger and immediately winced, spitting out the food onto the tray. The taste wasn’t bad, per se. But the texture grossed me out. It was like biting into mealy Styrofoam, with the closest flavor I can describe, of burnt, sweet and smoky pork. I moved the sandwich away from my face and looked at the burger, specifically my bite mark. The tomato bits stuck out from every available corner. I attempted to pull one out from the burger, where the small red lump popped off, like the snap of a grape from its vine. Slivers of greasy cheese poked from the pores of the meat, dribbling down in a leaky slime.

I examined the bun and looked closely, where the surface sort of looked like bread, but I could see small seams, where it appeared to be woven together. The meat chunks of the burger had haphazard char marks that made no sense, where blackened wormy veins crawled across the surface, bleeding into the underside of the bun. The cheese and pickles were thin slivers that ran perpendicular to the veiny squiggles. If you saw all of this from across the room, you’d assume it was a regular fast-food burger. But up close it was truly disgusting.

I sat the monstrosity down onto the table and walked up to the service counter, where I banged on the delivery hole.

“What the hell is in this thing? Did you fucking poison me?!”

I tried to read any ingredients on the menu, but the text was far too small and blurry. Whatever generated this text clearly didn’t care about anything other than the name of the food.

I attempted to pry open the service window, peeling the plastic panels back. I expected to see a kitchen with surprised cooks in the back, but to my surprise, I couldn’t make anything out, other than a dark void. I turned my phone’s light on and stuck my hand inside, filming anything I could. After a couple of haphazard waves with my hand, I pulled it back. I examined the video, but it only looked like I was filming a dark, brick room. The area couldn’t have been more than a couple feet in diameter. It was tiny. Practically a closet. What the hell? Where did the food come from?

I left the restaurant and traced the outside of the building, trying to find the kitchen, trying to find answers. However, the building stopped much earlier than I would have expected. Where the kitchen would normally be, was instead an empty alley, where a solid brick wall made up the back of the restaurant.