Broadway’s brightest new star is a coffee-making, disco-dancing robot.
San the Robot Barista is slinging java in the unlikely confines of Sanmiwago, a new Taiwanese dumpling spot on Broadway at West 53rd Street, next to the Stephen Colbert theater. The big-bellied bot has multi-jointed arms and prongs for fingers and whips up coffee, espresso, cappucino and lattes in 90 seconds.
I flipped for it immediately. For one thing, it’s faster than stoned-seeming Starbucks humans who take as long to whip up a pumpkin spice latte as it does to undergo an MRI.
And the highly-caffeinated elixirs I had were all terrific — an amazing feat in the fast-food wasteland of Broadway.
San can supposedly turn out fifty coffee beverages in an hour. For extra fun, when it’s on a work break, it disco-dances to “YMCA” and to Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell,” a limited repertory which partner Winnie Ng activates from a tablet.
It’s quite cute — although the Berry number poses no threat to Uma Thurman’s and John Travolta’s “Pulp Fiction” duet to the same song.
Partners Jeffrey Liu and Ng named their robot “San” after the restaurant’s name.
“But you can call him Adam too,” Liu said. That’s what a similar robot goes by at BotBar in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where the contraption first popped onto the Big Apple scene earlier this year.
The all-white, friendly-looking, tubby automatons hail from Nevada-based RichTech Robotics.
They’re fun to watch.
You order via a touchscreen that activates San, who fetches your coffee of choice from a storage container, pumps it through one of ten stainless-steel faucets, dispenses it into a mixing vessel to combine with milk, foam or ice and gracefully pours it into a plastic cup.
“Your iced foam latte is ready,” it says in an appropriately robotic baritone. The finished product is perfectly layered, the foam ice-cold on top of sizzling-hot espresso and milk.
The regular coffee and cappuccino choices I tried were rich, strong, hot — and at least as good as most of what passes for coffee in the neighborhood.
Liu hasn’t chosen a permanent coffee brand yet — “we’re trying different ones,” he said. Oddly for a Chinese restaurant, the robot can’t make tea, but several varieties are available at the counter.
The food’s cheap and hits the spot. “We try to do good food at good price,” Liu chuckled. For sure: A $16.95 bowl of satisfyingly seasoned Taiwanese beef noodles could easily feed two.
Thin-skinned, heartily-stuffed pork and chicken dumplings, available both pan-fried and boiled, were as good as at Sanmiwago’s much-praised Mott Street location in Chinatown.
Liu and Ng plan to open more Sanmiwagos with San on the job next year. The one on Broadway is open seven days until 2. a.m. — amazing on a West 50s stretch of Broadway that’s usually dead even before theaters close.
But can San handle serving large crowds when they come? “He’s very fast,” Liu said confidently.
And how about more disco choices for the hard-working java jockey?
“We’re working on that,” Winnie Ng promised.
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