EcoFactor: Restaurant with an onboard greenhouse allows diners to pick what they want to eat.
BHSL Design seems to put an end to the awkward feeling one gets when dating in a restaurant and not able to figure out what to eat from the hundreds of ambiguous dishes mentioned on the menu. The design firm is attempting to change restaurant dining a little with their new concept restaurant that does not require you to choose from the menu. Instead diners here will be able to go to the greenhouse, and pluck what all they want for dinner.
Belinda Ho and Li Shiqiao’s design came to the limelight when the couple was asked to design a restaurant for a rural area, for a competition held by a Japanese glass company. They somehow made up their mind to end the dominance of a menu in restaurants. Their refurbished menu includes vast hydroponic and aeroponic fields where the diners would be able to choose what they want to eat and prepare the selected veggies any way they want to. Chefs standing in cooking-information stations of this new menu guide the diners on the way they should cook the items. For some lazy diners chefs can also cook the selected vegetables themselves according to the diner’s wish.
The food growing in the hydroponic and aeroponic modular beds can be rapidly replaced. For this, Ho is imagining a gondola system that can deposit new food beds into place. Since the food grows at the place where it is to be eaten, it reduces the carbon footprint of the restaurant and also offers the “greens” of having a built-in green roof.
The Dark Side:
Picking what you want to eat seems a good idea, but we don’t see many people interested in cooking food as well. People visit restaurants to avoid cooking and the mess it creates back home. If they have to do all that in a restaurant, why wouldn’t they do the same in the cozy comfort of their own houses and that too after paying a good amount for the same?
Via: AIA
