When the robots eventually come for us, and they certainly will, they might not look like the fearsome exoskeletal, shiny-chrome killing machines from the Terminator films. They might be more like the robot waiting staff at Sakura, the Japanese all-you-can-eat restaurant on Cheetham Hill Road.
They seem fine when you arrive. Playful even. “Here I am!” they announce chirpily, when they turn up with dishes at your table, their cute, animated faces and painted on duds intended to make them fun and non-threatening, which they are. To start with.
It was a greeting which, during my brief time there this week, I soon began to dread. For some context, last week Observer food critic Jay Rayner arrived in town and nearly came to eat here by accident.
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There’s another place called Sakura in Salford (‘delightful’, Rayner has called it), but in relaying how he nearly went to the wrong Sakura, he dropped some details about ‘a Japanese all-you-can-eat place in Cheetham Hill, offering a range of nigiri, maki, teppanyaki and the like at about £30 a head, ordered via a tablet’ with ‘robot-assisted service’, and I thought ‘hang on, chief, you’ve missed a trick here, that sounds brilliant’.
It turns out he had not, and now here I am wishing I was at the delightful Sakura instead. To get the pleasantries out of the way, the (real) people who work here are lovely and helpful and pleasant. The food, by contrast, was grave.
Unless you’re a contestant on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, you should never dread the arrival of your dinner. Never. It is against the natural order of things.
And often, the novelty of the all-you-can-eat proposition can make you view your dinner more favourably than you otherwise might. That dizzy ‘I can order ANYTHING!’ excitement is an intoxicating thing indeed for the greedy man.
I went in wanting it to be great, truly I did, but ended up wanted it to stop after the first few three dishes, and it gives me no pleasure to report it, given the struggles facing restaurants currently. As for the robot waiting staff, I mind less about being brutally honest, though it might mean they come for me first on that fateful day that they decide that they've had enough.
They start out cute. They chirp ‘hello!’ and kids in the restaurant chirp ‘hello!’ back. It’s nice. One turns up at the table with a bowl of prawn crackers and some kimchi as a little entrée that I’ve not ordered, and that’s fun too.
But then it just stands there, side on, its blinking robot face staring the other way. Do I have to tip? Say thanks? Goodbye? Ask if it’s been busy today and what time it’s on 'til, like a cab driver? Does it wait until I’ve finished? And how does it know when I have? Is it watching me?
It gets bored of this eventually, and tells me to touch its face panel to signal it can get back to work, which I do, and it does. It’s a relief.
When it returns, saying ‘Dear customer, your meal is ready!’, the first wave of dishes it is carrying (I remember to touch ‘finish’ on its face this time to see it off) are regrettable choices from the 'new dishes' menu.
You know the phrase ‘where’s the beef?’ That was my question for the crispy chilli beef, which was all crisp and no beef. None.
Cumin is a strong, instantly detectable flavour. The chewy, greasy squares of cumin brisket had been nowhere near it. The lamb chop was a sorry flap of protein with a perm of thin, spiralised carrot perched on top like a man wearing a sad and obvious toupée. I still don’t know what was inside the deep fried sesame balls, but might start using the phrase as an insult.
‘Here I am!’ and it’s back again, after the second order - you can order five items every 10 minutes or so from the tablet left with you - and the greeting is becoming jarringly sinister. The fried squid rings are the reformed type, mashed squid formed into perfect circles and battered like cheap onion rings (which I love, incidentally), the tempura prawns the same, all impossibly straight and uniform.
They’re both merely a texture, and taste of nothing at all. An actual man delivers a single eel nigiri. At least when it’s a robot, you don’t really have to feel anything, but he seemed sad putting it down on the table, and then so did I, because it was bland and flavourless.
The grilled chicken gyoza were barely room temperature, so I didn’t eat them beyond a first exploratory bite. Neither did I order sushi (sashimi is not included in the £30 menu) because if squid and prawns are being treated like this, I’ll swerve the raw fish.
The final wave is the grimmest, the ‘Here I am!’ now more like a catchphrase from a horror movie. The lemon chicken was two tragic pieces of orange fried wooliness in a container like a child’s paint palette with a small indent for the lemon sauce, though some yellow acrylic paint might have been more pleasant to dip it into. The katsu was truly grisly, the sweet and sour chicken likewise.
A piece of duck was grey and flabby, and all of these dishes were slid, barely eaten, onto a passing robot and whisked silently back into the kitchen. It felt a bit cowardly doing it that way, but better that than having to explain to an actual real person how bad they were. That's the problem with this kind of faceless all-you-can-eat. Don't like it? Just order something else, they'll never know.
A quick trip to the dessert fridge resulted in two dry, congealed cubes that had clearly been sitting out for hours, one a black forest gateaux style cube, another a brownie cube, both equally inedible.
It was a depressing vision of a future that as a species we probably deserve, a grim purgatory we will have brought upon ourselves. A meal that was both the worst from my tenure at this newspaper, and at the same time the most novel. Quite an achievement, in its own way.
As for the overall value, it has and will always have volume on its side. For £30, go nuts. Eat everything you dare, but repent at your leisure.
If/when AI realises itself and decides that it would much rather extinguish us than answer Amazon customer queries or stock supermarket shelves, perhaps the revolution will start from right here.
I cannot think of a more apt place for the end times to begin.
Sakura, 175 Cheetham Hill Rd, Cheetham Hill, Manchester M8 8LG
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