Robot fast-food chefs: Hype or a sign of industry change?

BOSTON (AP) — Robots can’t yet bake a souffle or fold a burrito, but a new restaurant in Boston is employing what it calls a “never-before-seen robotic kitchen” to cook up ingredients and spout them into a bowl.

Seven autonomously swirling cooking pots hum behind the counter at Spyce, which opened Thursday in the city’s downtown.

Experts differ on whether to call the restaurant’s machinery a robot or just an automated kitchen. But they also say it’s likely that the fast-food industry will experience more such automation in the coming years as machines replace more mundane food preparation and order-taking tasks.

Spyce was founded by four MIT undergraduates who built a prototype in their fraternity basement. They later partnered on the restaurant project with Michelin-starred chief Daniel Boulud.