The premise sounds like science fiction. You walk into a restaurant. Before you see a menu, a robot greets you at the entrance, points a camera at your face and tongue, analyses the texture and coating of what it sees, and hands you a personalised list of dishes tailored to your body’s apparent needs.
Then, in the kitchen behind you, other robots cook every one of them.
This is not a concept. It is already happening. And it has just kicked off one of the most interesting debates in food, technology, and privacy.
The Restaurant That Reads Your Tongue
The 24 Jieqi Robot Restaurant opened in the Xihu district of Hangzhou, in eastern China’s Zhejiang Province, drawing large crowds and significant international attention. The two-storey venue covers roughly 260 square metres and is staffed almost entirely by robots.
They stir-fry, boil noodles, brew coffee, make ice cream, deliver dishes, and clean the floor. According to reports, these machines now handle around 60% of the kitchen workload.
But the most striking feature is at the door. At the entrance, an AI “diagnosis robot” scans customers’ faces and tongues, then recommends dishes based on their complexion.
Before customers place orders, the robots perform an “AI analysis” by scanning their faces and tongues and asking them to complete a simple questionnaire.
The robots then create a report about the customer’s lifestyle, emotions and digestion status before recommending seasonal health-focused dishes.
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The concept is not a random tech novelty. It is rooted in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), which has used tongue and facial diagnosis for centuries, reading the colour, coating, and texture of the tongue as indicators of organ health, nutritional balance, and internal condition.
The concept applies TCM’s tongue and facial diagnostic principles, colour, texture, and appearance, indicating organ health and nutritional deficiencies, through machine learning to generate personalised meal recommendations in real time.
It is simultaneously the most technologically advanced and most culturally rooted restaurant concept currently operating.
Zhu Qi, an engineer who develops the cooking robots, explained the broader learning process behind the kitchen automation: the robots store data on stove fire settings from the work of human chefs and mimic the chefs’ movements for stir-frying and spinning the pot. He added that the food in the restaurant has become cheaper following the application of robots.
One elderly diner, who visits the restaurant regularly, captured the experience succinctly, reportedly saying, “The dishes are really fragrant. If you didn’t tell me in advance, you wouldn’t know they were cooked by robots. They are neither salty nor oily. It’s just what we senior citizens like.”
Deng Xuhui, a chef at Madayunhe Community Canteen in the Gongshu District, speaking with SCMP, said that before, during peak hours, he was preparing dozens of dishes at once; however, now, “It saves half of my energy. So I can focus on checking the raw materials’ quality, inventing new cuisine and managing the kitchen.”
However, as compelling as the concept is, it sits squarely in the crosshairs of a rapidly intensifying global debate about biometric data collection.
The Jackson Lewis workplace privacy team, in their definitive Top 10 Privacy Issues for 2026 analysis, identified the core risk, commenting, “Biometric data collection continues to expand beyond fingerprints and facial recognition to include voiceprints, behavioral identifiers, and AI-derived biometric inferences. Litigation under Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) remains active, but risk is spreading through broader definitions of sensitive data in state privacy laws.”
Image Credits: Google Images
Sources: Moneycontrol, NDTV, South China Morning Post
Find the blogger: @chirali_08
This post is tagged under: Restaurant, Restaurant trends, food trends, food, food news, AI Restaurant, chinese AI Restaurant, ai, robot
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