The Serverless Restaurants

In certain large cities of the 1920s, automatic restaurants allowed dining with almost no employee interaction. Behind small metal windows, customers retrieved coffees, sandwiches, or desserts by inserting a few coins. These fascinating places gave the impression of entirely mechanized, ultramodern eating.

In the early 20th century, "automats" enjoy immense success in the United States, carried by the Horn & Hardart chain. The principle has all the marks of a futuristic promise: dishes wait behind individual glass compartments, and you simply slide a few coins to open the small metal door and take your meal. Visible service almost entirely disappears, with employees reloading the compartments from behind, hidden from view.

This device translates the era's fascination with industrial automation, at a time when machines proliferate, supposedly accelerating and rationalizing everyday gestures. Automats especially seduce large metropolises like New York, to which they offer a fast, efficient, and democratic image of modernity, emphasized by decor of shiny metal surfaces, repeated geometries, and aligned luminous windows.

The resulting social experience is singular: one eats faster, more silently, in a partially dehumanized relationship to the meal. Well before vending machines and digital ordering, these restaurants already announced several contemporary forms of contactless consumption.