Food arriving at restaurant tables via pneumatic tubes might sound like a scene from TV show "Futurama" (it is), but the concept actually exists in one ambitious cafe in New Zealand.
C1 restaurant in Christchurch has installed a series of ‘food delivery' pipes which run from the kitchen into the café and deliver the establishment's signature Slider dish, comprising mini burgers and fries, to the clientele.
The installation process is already underway and will take approximately a year to complete.
Metal cases containing the dishes will eventually be shuttled under the floor and up through the table legs, to avoid the space being cluttered up with tubes.
"It's something we've had in the works since before we opened," said owner Sam Crofskey.
The café was destroyed in an earthquake in 2010 and has since been rebuilt, with several modifications.
"When we rebuilt the cafe, we did so with the goal of being the world's greatest cafe," said Crofskey. "A pneumatic burger tube is just one of the many points of difference that our business has."
The invention is the latest in a line of quirky food delivery systems across the restaurant industry.
These include the widespread trend of the sushi conveyor belt; the concept of ordering food directly from interactive tabletop surfaces and even robot waiter service at the Hajime restaurant in Japan.
Perhaps one of the most unorthodox approaches comes from the Ka Tron restaurant in Bangkok, where chickens are cooked, loaded into a catapult, fired across the restaurant and caught on a spike being held by a waiter riding a unicycle.
