Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll find out about restaurants that use robotic systems to make the dishes they serve. We’ll also get details on the settlement between former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the two Georgia election workers he defamed.
“Do you want to tip the robot?” my colleague Julie Creswell asked. We were ordering salads on a touch pad at the Sweetgreen near Madison Square Garden. I had asked her to go to lunch there because she had written about restaurants that are experimenting with automation. That Sweetgreen location has been outfitted with an assembly-line-style conveyor belt and a computer-controlled system that puts the ingredients in the bowls. Most of the ingredients, anyway. The system would mash the avocado and maul the salmon in our orders, and we ordered the miso sesame ginger dressing on the side, so workers behind the counter put the containers of dressing in after our bowls came off the conveyor belt. It had stopped beneath refrigerator-door-size units labeled “greens,” “grains,” “roasted,” “veggies,” “proteins” and “sauces.” At each stop, ingredients dropped into the bowls — or not, if an order did not call for anything that could be dispensed there. For all the seeming uniformity of the assembly line, the units above the conveyor belt are not all alike: The last two have fans to keep the temperature down. Behind the “roasted” and “veggie” doors, there’s a heat-lamp glow. The Sweetgreen location does not have robots with arms that can swing wide, like the ones that weld cars in automobile plants. Kernel — started by Steve Ells, who founded Chipotle in the 1990s — does, and discovered the hard way that the robot revolution has hiccups to smooth out. Ells shut down Kernel’s two Manhattan locations last month “to go to version 2.0.” The overhaul probably won’t be completed before March. Sweetgreen’s system, called the Infinite Kitchen, harnesses automation for basic repetitive actions, like dropping the ingredients into the bowl. “Where preparation is repetitive, technology and automation are great,” Andrew Rigie, the executive director of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, an industry group. Restaurant robots hold the potential to reduce labor costs over time, reshaping the work force. A study of “automatable work” in New York by the Center for an Urban Future several years ago found that 84 percent of the work done by restaurant cooks could be automated. “We’re going to continue to see more and more restaurants adopt automation in their operations,” Rigie said, “but we’re a far ways off from the Jetsons.” One reason is that automated systems are expensive. Sweetgreen expects to spend as much as $550,000 on automation in each restaurant with automation that it opens this year. It is focusing on new locations because it’s not easy to retrofit a restaurant, squeezing bulky machinery into the tight spaces in a kitchen. Sweetgreen took seven weeks to overhaul the location near Madison Square Garden with the system that made our lunches. Employees there still cook mainstays like chicken and brussels sprouts. They also slice vegetables. They feed those ingredients into the containers in the units above the conveyor belt. The system had to be modified to rotate the salad bowls as they go down the line so that the individual ingredients would land in different parts of the bowl, avoiding what Julie called “a lava-like overflow.” Sweetgreen also had to work out how to slice hard-boiled eggs automatically — and how much kale the system could handle. (Occasionally, some varieties get stuck.) Sweetgreen says its automated systems can turn out churn out 500 bowls in an hour, compared with a top human speed of about 300. It also says that locations using the Infinite Kitchen system are considerably more profitable than the average: One in Naperville, Ill., has a profit margin of more than 31 percent, well above the 20.7 percent average for the chain. As for our lunches, I let Julie do the ordering. She bypassed the choices on the board behind the counter and created one of her own, choosing spring mix, baby spinach, roasted sweet potatoes, cucumbers, avocado and miso glazed salmon, with miso sesame ginger dressing. All but the last three went into the bowls on the conveyor belt. “They still have to have some intervention,” Julie said as a worker behind the counter put the avocados, the salmon and the dressings (in little cups) in our bowls. The tablet we used to place the order said our salads would be ready in three to five minutes. My name was called about 6 minutes 30 seconds after Julie turned on the stopwatch function on her cellphone. And the tip? I tapped the $2 option on the tablet — not enough, I now realize. I trust that the money will go to the person who put the avocado and salmon into the bowl. WEATHER Today will be sunny and breezy, with a high near 39. Tonight, clouds increase, and the temperature holds steady around 36. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until Monday (Martin Luther King’s Birthday). The latest New York news
We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Giuliani settles defamation case, keeping his property
It seems that Rudolph Giuliani will not have to give up his 10-room apartment on the Upper East Side, his Mercedes-Benz convertible or his signed Joe DiMaggio jersey. He reached a settlement on Thursday with two Georgia election workers he had defamed. They stand to receive compensation — neither side said how much, and Giuliani, who had said the case had drained his financial resources, did not say where he would get any money to pay them. He also promised never to defame them again. “The past four years have been a living nightmare,” the women said in a statement. “We have fought to clear our names, restore our reputations and prove that we did nothing wrong. With the settlement agreement, they said, “We can now move forward with our lives.” Until Thursday, it had appeared that Giuliani’s baseless claims about the workers would cost him millions of dollars in assets. He had been found liable for defaming the two women, Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss; he said repeatedly that they had manipulated ballots in an effort to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump. A jury awarded Freeman and Moss $148 million in late 2023. Giuliani filed for bankruptcy and, after missing several deadlines to turn over his assets, was held in contempt of court earlier this month. Joseph Cammarata, a lawyer for Giuliani, said that his client was satisfied with the outcome. But he declined to discuss the status of sanctions that Giuliani faced for being found in contempt in two courts tied to the defamation case. The settlement came after a dramatic day in court in Manhattan. Giuliani had been expected to take the stand to plead for the right to keep an apartment in Florida and three World Series rings from the Yankees. But he never showed up. His son, Andrew Giuliani, had also been expected to take the witness stand to say that the three rings should not be seized because the former mayor had given them to him. After the settlement was announced, Andrew Giuliani said that he was keeping the rings. METROPOLITAN DIARY Puzzling
Dear Diary: I’ve taken the A to work for 20 years. And for 20 years, I’ve done puzzles on the train during the ride. I didn’t think there could be any more firsts for me on my commute after so long until a recent morning. As I sat there working on a Sudoku puzzle, a man stood over me telling me where to put the numbers. At first, I was inclined to tell him he was out of line. Instead, I complimented him on his ability to read backward, and we did the Sudoku together until he got off the train. — Sandra Feldman Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. I’ll be away next week. Colleagues from the Metro desk will write New York Today while I’m gone. See you again on Jan. 28. — J.B. P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Makaelah Walters and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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