SF Restaurant Serves Dish On iPads

While millennials are a highly coveted demographic in many business sectors, there is one restaurant in San Francisco that is reaching to new heights to attract a younger, tech-savvy clientele — or at least to attract some additional attention.

Three-Michelin-star restaurant Quince has reportedly begun to serve food on iPads. And no, we’re not referring to mobile point-of-sale or digital ordering via iPad — we mean the restaurant is literally serving a meal on top of an iPad.

The dish, dubbed “a dog in search of gold,” has been described as white truffle croquettes served on iPads playing videos of water dogs on the truffle hunt. Sounds tasty, and questions of cleanliness aside (how exactly do restaurants go about sanitizing an iPad for reuse, anyway?), a media experience with a meal is something that many do in their homes.

Though the trend is nothing new — unconventional plating tactics and the fiery backlash against them have been rolling around the internet since 2015 — this is one of the first instances in the U.S. that has grabbed attention. Whether you’re a lover or loather of such plating, it’s at least sort of a step in the right direction for U.S. restaurants and their use of technology.

While the U.S. restaurant scene certainly isn’t a technological wasteland — some chains have been slowly integrating tablets and self-service kiosks, and a few restaurants in San Francisco are experimenting with automation with the help of tech startups — the restaurant industry in the States is far less integrated than it is in comparable markets elsewhere in the world.

In 2016, 68 percent of customers in Asia reported using a mobile device to place a food order in the past three months, and in the Middle East, that statistic was about 60 percent. But in North America, placing mobile orders in restaurants is still a novelty. Of those surveyed, only 32 percent of customers in North America reported ordering food using a mobile device in the three months prior.