A restaurant in Sydney, Australia is said to be the first in Australia (and probably anywhere else) to replace printed menus with iPads.
Diners at Global Mundo Tapas in the Rydges Hotel in North Sydney can use iPads to order meals, and even to specify how they’d like their meat cooked or get advice on food pairings and which wines to drink. The custom app used by the restaurant shows pictures of the dishes on the menu and sends orders to the kitchen via WiFi.
The app can also keep track of stock levels and automatically remove items from the menu if they’re sold out.
I can see a lot of advantages to using the iPad in this way, but also some big downside issues. For starters (no pun intended), I wonder how many dropped iPads a place would get per day if they were really replacing all menus with iPads. And having iPads handled continually with greasy fingers and being used around glasses full of liquid that can kill them with just a routine spill is very scary. It would be hugely expensive to cope with even a few broken / ruined iPads per day due to spillages and drops.
Also, how many seats in the place? How would they even find enough iPads (and get past the 2 per person quota) to provide more than a handful of ‘MenuPads’?
It feels like a lovely bit of PR for the restaurant and the iPad, but I wonder how realistic the changeover is, and how long it will last.
What do you all think? If you owned a restaurant would you use iPads for menus?
Sources: news.com.au via 9to5Mac
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
very interesting idea. good job. thank yo
That is very futuristic! And a great gimmick for attracting new diners. It seems like an expensive option for menus – but if it creates greater efficiencies, then maybe it's worth it.
I would think they'll have to attract a hell of a lot more business to cover the cost of X number of iPads and then all those that get damaged and need replacement.
I wonder how they got Apple to sell them 15 iPads. I thought there was a limit of two per customer…
I think that this is a wonderful idea, particularly if a restaurant gives you an opportunity to check stock. On a recent trip I found that several restaurants had run out of items.
How can you run a 15 hour business on a 8 hour iPad charge???