A virtual bite: Click-to-order at this restaurant

Overhead projector at each table beams down icons for looking through the menu, ordering food and checking on bill.

LONDON: An Asian-themed restaurant named “Inamo” in London's theatre district is providing its customers a virtual bite of what they can eat before they place an order from the menu. Food images are projected on to diners' plates which makes it easier to make a choice.

When diners are ready to place their order, they can just tap the touchpad and the sashimi will be with them shortly.

Entrepreneur Noel Hunwick, 29, said that he came up with this idea while eating at a pizza parlour with his friend and future business partner, Daniel Potter, a few years earlier, “we were desperately calling out the waiter who wouldn’t listen to us. So we thought wouldn’t it be great if we could press a button and get our food?”

“The idea had legs”, Oxford graduate Hunwick exclaimed.

An overhead projector at each table beams down a virtual, interactive tablecloth with icons for looking through the menu, ordering food and checking on the bill.

The plate stays blank until customers use a touchpad to open the menu and click on items, when the projector beams down images.

The order is sent to the kitchen, once a dish is chosen. A waiter will greet a customer before the meal and the waiter only comes next time to serve the food.

The concept of Inamo is a high-tech, high-end take on conventional picture-menus common to Asian restaurants.

Hunwick said a click-to-order restaurant where having customers create their own orders meant the restaurant could cut cost on staff, while not having to rely on waiters running to and from the kitchen, sometimes unaware of the diners’ call.