Have you ever been to a new restaurant, and you have no idea what to order? Everything sounds so tempting but since this is your first time, you want to order the right dish or it will completely ruin your night. Sometimes no matter how well the food is described, when it arrives on to your plate, it’s just completely different from what you’ve imagined or from the menu, and sometimes in finer restaurants, pictures are not even provided.
London-based restaurant Inamo is hoping to change all of that, thanks to a new system they have employed, called the E-Table, which was designed to give patrons more control over their dining experience. Thanks to projectors installed in the ceiling, the menu along with pictures of the food are projected down on to the table itself, which doubles as a monitor of sorts. By using a touch mousepad on the table, diners can navigate the menu, place orders, project a “table cloth” of their choosing, and play games while waiting for food to arrive. If all of this sounds familiar, perhaps you may have read our previous post where a restaurant in Taipei, Taiwan known as moJo iCuisine has employed something very similar.
We’re not sure if the technology used here is the same, but either way it looks like interactive menus are starting to catch on in restaurants, but there’s really no way to tell if these features are actually adding on to the dining experience, or perhaps just a piece of novelty technology that may soon fade into obscurity.