Good Taste

 

Upon returning from El Nido, a stay at the farm near Tarlac and our aborted trip to see the Hundred Isles, we spent a week close to our home in Baguio. My BIL, who was also our driver, returned to Manila for a week of work and my wife spent her time going out and meeting various groups of her friends and former classmates. As a husband, I sometimes went and sometimes didn't, depending on venue and what my wife was requesting. None of it was terribly exciting though so I won't bore you with the details. 

At some point though during that week, I took my kids and their cousins out to eat at a local eatery called "Good Taste". It was quite the experience and I could come up with nothing quite like it that I've ever been too. First and foremost, the restaurant is massive and consists of five floors! At least the one floor we ate on, level five, could seat probably 300 to 400 people. I would say it was only half full when we got there so maybe around 200 people. I have no idea how many people were eating on the other three floors because we took the elevator to the top floor.

On the first floor when you entered the restaurant was the kitchen area where all the meals were cooked and a bank of food elevators seen above to whisk your completed food up to the floor you were sitting on. The food itself was all served family style which made it easier but still quite impressive in my mind knowing how many tables were on each floor.

After being seated, we looked over the menu and decided what dishes to order. At that point, you just flagged down one of the servers in red and they came over with their electronic tablet and took your order. They had ample time to do this in large part due to the robots, one of which you can see above. Once your drink order or later dessert order was entered into the system, they were electronically sent to the drink station or dessert station on the floor where they were filled and then the robot programmed to deliver them directly to our table without human help. There it would pause until we unloaded our drinks and desserts and hit a button on the screen saying we had everything. Our meal came to another station, at the other end of the bank of elevators and were placed on carts and manually delivered by the human servers on large wheeled carts.

All in all, it was an incredibly efficient design and I imagine a very profitable one since to wait on hundreds if not close to a thousand people at once, they only needed very minimal wait staff. The food lived up to it's name and tasted very good and overall I was pleased with the experience. I imagine this sort of thing will arrive here soon if it hasn't already. 

On a related side note but worthy of mentioning, is that there isn't tipping in the Philippines like there is here in the States. When you go to the restaurant and want to pay by credit card, they will bring the credit card reader over to your table, punch in the amount and you scan your card. They don't turn it around to allow you to add a tip. They just hand you a receipt and tell you to have a great day while smiling. It is so refreshing compared to say my experience last night where I stopped into a local Chinese restaurant here in the U.S. to get some noodles which is an Asian requirement when someone in your family is celebrating a birthday. I had placed my order to go and when paying, the cashier spun her device around so I could leave a tip. The minimum "recommended tip" option was a whopping 25% and the other two options went up to 30%! I was floored and took the time to enter a custom tip of a few bucks (10%) which I still felt was a rip off since I was picking up my food and walking out, no service needed.