The auto-restaurant

Japanese firm Fine Foods Inc. has come up with a system for putting a kitchenless, chefless mini-restaurant into virtually any type of shop that happens to have a spare bit of space going to waste. The target is places like Internet cafes and manga coffee shops that don't have room for a real kitchen or the resources to retain a chef, but somehow need to provide tasty nutrients for the sleepless fraggers. Orders are keyed in at your table and beamed to a central server, from whence the restaurant pod is instructed to retrieve the appropriate ingredients from the freezer and program the microwave. The automation breaks down with a loud clanking sound at this point, however, since the results then have to be zapped and served by a member of the species that Japanese robots have bred to do menial tasks—a human. Finding that out rather burst our gleaming high-tech bubble, and got us down almost as much as waking up this morning to find that the rainy season had hit Tokyo and that the accursed radio was playing "Rainy Days and Mondays".