There is a new breed of Chinese chefs.
Hong Kong restaurateur Chen Guanhua was forced to find a permanent replacement for the cooks who would leave him a few months after he hired them. He is now proud of his new kitchen crew at one of his restaurants in Kwun Tong. The cook can prepare an order in two to three minutes.
Chen told the South China Morning Post (SCMP) that the robot chef starts cooking upon receiving the order made through a tablet at the counter.
“It automatically retrieves pre-packed items from the fridge, pours oil and ingredients into the cooking pot, stir-fries the food, thickens the sauce and serves the food on a plate. It then washes the equipment,” reports SCMP.
Unlike other robot cooks in the market, Chen said his chef knows how to thicken sauce. He actually has a company making robot chefs at a factory in Tsuen Wan, which aims to produce 3,000 units in 2025 for export.
One chef in Japan cannot be outdone by Chen’s bots though. She is Karin Tabira, a licensed preparer of pufferfish “fugu,” a delicacy.
Tabira was among 60 people — mostly professional chefs — who passed the test on fugu preparation in the Yamaguchi region this summer, out of 93 people who tried, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports.
Fugu is often served raw at high-end restaurants in Japan, where chefs must hold a license proving they can safely slice around the organs of the pufferfish that contain a lethal poison, AFP said. Occasionally, unlicensed individuals eat fugu caught in the sea and die.
Tabira recently used her new skills to serve a platter of paper-thin slices of fugu sashimi to the governor of southern Kumamoto region where she lives.
“I was happy when the governor said ‘oishi,’” meaning delicious in Japanese, she told reporters at the event where Governor Takashi Kimura ate the dish, according to AFP.
Incidentally, the new fugu chef is only 10 years old. The fifth grader is the youngest person authorized to prepare pufferfish sashimi, a delicacy that can kill its eater if its poisonous parts are not properly removed.