A novel robotic restaurant concept, Creator, is getting a second lease on life with the grand opening of a flagship Thursday in Daly City’s Westlake Shopping Center.
The startup — initially made famous for its burger-flipping robot — had just added dinner service to its 680 Folsom St. location last year when Covid shutdowns emptied out dining rooms, leading to the location's closure that summer.
It’s making its Terminator-like return with improved technology that can cook a burger in under four minutes. And it incorporates a new and crucial human element — interaction with customers, who now get to control the robot and customize their orders with more than two dozen seasoning and sauce options via a smartphone app.
“It’s like having access to a frickin' science lab to titrate sauce onto your bun,” founder Alex Vardakostas said. “We have no idea what people are going to do with it. It unlocks a lot of crazy stuff.”
Including, added CEO Pehr Luedtke, “consumers’ ability to appreciate precision in cuisine they never really considered to be precise. There’s lots of things you can do with a burger.”
With the app, customers can save their burger setting preferences and share them, enabling Creator to perfectly reproduce recipes from guest chefs such as Tu David Phu from “Top Chef.” Luedtke likened it to recording a song and playing it back with no skipping.
“I’m continually impressed that the technology reproduces my burger exactly as I’d make it, without me having to be there,” Phu said in a statement, noting the complexity of additions like fish sauce, shiitake and oyster mushrooms for his Tumami Burger, back once again in the Creator kitchen.
“We actually like carved out more of the griddle, so you can see kind of into more of it than the last machine,” Vardakostas added. “The robot grinds the meat to order. It’s super delicate with how it places the meat in and has all of its algorithms for how it cooks. People want to see that.”
Creator was founded in 2012 around the idea that robots could take care of repetitive cooking tasks and make them more precise, while freeing up employees for more creative elements of the job such as hospitality or dreaming up the recipe for that next perfect burger.
The concept has raised at least $18.7 million to date through 2019, per Crunchbase, from investors including Khosla Ventures and LDV Partners.
Luedtke declined to specify total funding, but indicated many of the investors behind the SoMa location were ready to back the new Daly City stop — and more down the line.
“We’re lucky to be in a position of growth right now, so we plan to open more stores,” Luedtke said. “We don’t expect to be a one-store operation in Daly City. We’ll be growing around the Bay Area. …deliberately, is the right word.”
Luedtke added there’s “no lack of strategic options,” such as franchising, developing a chain, selling their products in different formats — even “burgers-as-a-service” for other restaurants, and it’s not hard to imagine the attraction doing well in an airport or sports stadium.
The new store is slightly smaller than the old SoMa location, in the former office of a bank. One of the appeals of the robot’s latest model is that it eschews the need for the ventilation and natural gas requirements of a typical restaurant, giving Creator the chance to scale quickly in real estate that’s usually a nonstarter for chefs. The burgers themselves start at $6 and go up depending on the options selected.
Vardakostas said the Daly City shopping mall location also bodes well for foot traffic, with nearby anchor tenants including Trader Joe’s, Safeway and Home Depot meaning exposure to a lot more families and age diversity than in San Francisco.
“Why are we bringing all the cool stuff to S.F.?” Vardakostas said. “Being able to play Chef Tu’s ‘song’ in Daly City is I think way cooler.”
