If you dream of a robot cooking your food for you, Rosey from the Jetsons isn’t as far away as she may seem. Spyce, a fast-casual eatery located in Downtown Crossing, has what you are looking for.
Spyce, which opened on May 3rd, features a robotic kitchen, affordable “bowl” options and a funky playlist inspired by Motown, early Rhythm and Blues and Wes Anderson.
The masterminds behind this kitchen are Kale Rogers, Michael Farid, Brady Knight and Luke Schlueter, tenderly known as the "Spyce boys." At MIT, the four were teammates on the water polo team and members of the same fraternity. Knight took almost every class with Rogers. Knight also remembered Farid helping him out with his first physics assignment at an away water polo meet his freshman year.
When Farid entered graduate school in 2014, he wasn’t able to keep his meal plan. He didn’t have the money or time to cook, so he needed a solution.
In January 2015, the Spyce boys got to work to build their meal crafting robot. The first prototype was built in the basement of their fraternity, Delta Upsilon, and was called the O.G. Spyce.
When they graduated in 2016, Rogers, Knight and Schlueter from undergraduate, and Farid from graduate school, they began to work on the venture full time.
They knew they needed a chef to help them develop their menu, so Farid guessed the email address of world renowned chef Daniel Boulud and sent him a video of what they had created so far.
Boulud hopped on board immediately and became the culinary director. He called in Sam Benson, a former sous chef at Café Boulud, to come in as the executive chef. Benson also had previous fast-casual experience from working behind the scenes at Chipotle.
“I was thinking of new, fun, and different, but familiar,” Benson said about the menu options. “I wanted to be able to pack in as much flavor as possible.”
The menu is made up of different bowl options. Some choices include the chicken and rice bowl topped with a sumac white sauce, the Indian bowl which features a coconut tikka masala sauce, and the beet bowl with goat cheese and sunflower seeds.
The prep is done by hand offsite, but the robot does everything after that other than garnishing. When someone places an order on one of the self-serve computer screens, the ingredients are each released in a perfect portion into an orange box they call the “runner.” Once the runner collects all of the ingredients, it places them into a wok that cooks by induction, and is constantly tumbling and mixing the food for about two minutes, according to head engineer Schlueter. After that, the meal will plate itself and the wok will clean itself.
Each bowl starts at $7.50. Affordability for everyone was one of the goals behind the Spyce model.
“It’s been a lot of hard work, but the feedback has been fantastic,” Benson said. “We have big dreams for this.”
