What The Hell America!

On sweltering summer days, chef Park Jeong-eun would cook makguksu, an earthy Korean dish made with buckwheat noodles steeped in a tangy, ice-cold broth, topped with spicy gochujang paste. Truck drivers would come from faraway places to the Munmak rest stop, on the highway in the mountainous Gangwon-do province in South Korea, to eat her food.

That was until February 2024, when three robot chefs took over the kitchen at Munmak. The restaurant’s menu has since changed, away from local delicacies like makguksu and slow-cooked beef stews to easily automatable dishes such as ramen, udon, and varieties of Korean stews. The robots speed through 150 meals every hour, nearly double what Park can make by hand. 

When longtime patrons learn their beloved menu items are no more, they gasp and walk out the door, she recalled to Rest of World. 

“Our customers say the dishes we used to cook tasted much better than what the robots serve now,” Park, 58, said. “Even though the robots have lightened my workload, I’ve lost my sense of pride in our food.”

Park now finds refuge scrubbing dishes in the back of the kitchen, away from the counter, where customers barrage her with harsh complaints about the food. Sometimes, they return their ramen bowls untouched in protest, she said.

The robot chefs at Munmak are part of South Korea’s push toward greater automation in the service sector. The nation already leads the world in industrial robots, with more than 1,000 machines for every 10,000 workers in 2023, nearly three times the global average. 

South Korean tech companies are now deploying collaborative robots, or co-bots, which work alongside humans, in hotels, elder care, schools, and restaurants. The sector is projected to reach $367 million in value this year, from $254 million in 2024, according to the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information. 

The bots are supposed to solve a looming labor shortage in the rapidly aging nation, where workers aged 60 and above make up nearly a quarter of the workforce. The government plans to increase the number of bot workers to 1 million by 2030 as a longterm solution. 

Munmak, too, faced a severe work shortage, and bot chefs help keep the kitchen staffed 24/7, Ham Jin-kyu, president of the Korea Expressway Corporation, a public institution that manages the country’s rest stops, said during Munmak’s grand reopening last year.

“For tasks too demanding for humans to perform 24 hours a day, we need to use robots in a limited capacity, in this transformative era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” Ham said, referring to the current wave of automation across industries.

Human chefs who work alongside the robot chefs told Rest of World they are able to work at a more relaxed pace, especially during peak hours, because the machines grind away tirelessly. But they also spoke of layoffs and a loss of dignity due to automation. 

Munmak sits on the Yeongdong highway, conveniently located as a stop for freight trucks, charter buses, and cars dashing to the countryside.

Inside the “smart” rest stop, machines whir quietly. A truckers’ lounge offers an electric massage bed. There’s a self-service convenience store, and Cafe Hubot, where a robot barista brews coffee behind a plexiglass counter. And then there’s the automated restaurant.

When a customer orders a bowl of dumpling ramen at a kiosk, a robot activates. A steel nozzle swirls boiling water and spicy broth paste into a pot. Dried noodles drop from a dispenser. Cradling heat and spice, the pot glides onto a burner. An overhead chute sprinkles dried vegetable flakes. The ramen simmers.

Finally, a kitchen worker stirs the noodles and places a few dumplings on top. A robotic arm lifts the pot and pours the ramen into a bowl, which travels down a conveyor belt to the counter. 

“Customer number 477, your food is ready,” an automated voice announces to a catchy tune.

The robots were developed by Chef Robot Tech, a startup based in Namyangju, a robotics hub outside Seoul. The company reprogrammed the RB5 co-bot, originally built by a subsidiary of Samsung Electronics, to mimic human cooking motions. They used training data created from dozens of trial runs by a team of engineers and chefs. Their bots can cook ramen, udon, or stew.

“When there’s a sudden rush of customers flowing in, the robots can produce consistent, standardized dishes in a short amount of time,” Im Sang-jun, the chief executive of Chef Robot Tech, told Rest of World.

Workers at Munmak are now protected from toxic fumes, painful burns, and arthritic injuries, Kim Hye-rim, a deputy director of the service innovation team at Korea Expressway Corporation, told Rest of World. Customers can order from the restaurant’s full menu round the clock, and the volume of sales has increased, she said.

“[But] some customers seem to miss the touch of a human hand in the food,” she added.

The corporation manages more than 200 rest stops nationwide, and has already helped nine restaurants to automate. Kitchen staff are reassigned to people-facing roles at counters, kiosks, and visitor centers, Kim said. 

“Ensuring employment stability and creating new jobs will be a key priority” as the corporation pushes forward with automation, she said. “Robots have stirred a revolution in the global food tech industry and represent a new paradigm for transforming rest-stop restaurants.” 

But the robots are likely to displace some workers, Hwang Ji-woong, head of South Korea’s rest stop restaurant workers’ union, told Rest of World. Two out of eight employees at Munmak were laid off after the robots were installed in February 2024, Lee Hyun, deputy manager at the rest stop, told Rest of World.

“[Robots] could improve productivity in the long run, but for now, workers who want to stay will have nowhere to go,” Hwang said.

Restaurant workers in the country are at high risk of being displaced by automation due to the technical, repetitive nature of their job, according to a recent study. 

“While automation may offer a crucial solution to South Korea’s shrinking workforce, the transition risks plunging many workers into unemployment,” Koo Kyo-jun, a public administration professor at Korea University and co-author of the study, told Rest of World. To ease the burden, the government should invest in retraining programs that help workers adapt to shifting job roles, or pivot into new careers, Koo said. 

Before automation, Munmak’s kitchen staff worked at breakneck pace during peak hours. The heat pressed in, fumes clung to their clothes, and the rush wore down even the most seasoned workers, chef Park recalled.

“Summers are especially exhausting. Customers pack the restaurant, can’t find seats, and stand in lines to wait for their food,” she said.

The work is hard on older women, who usually staff rest stop kitchens. They strain their joints lifting heavy pots and endlessly stirring boiling stews. They work 12-hour shifts, including weekends and holidays. Wages are low, and turnover is high. 

Still, some women stay because these jobs, backed by a large corporation, are less precarious than those in smaller restaurants.

Since the automation, the kitchen is usually calm. Park no longer cooks. She monitors the machines, fixes glitches, restocks ingredients, and scrubs dishes, working fast before the next wave of orders crash in. “We each used to work in our own stations, but now we have to master every task to run the entire kitchen alone. It’s really challenging,” she said. 

Hers is not the only restaurant undergoing the transition. Nestled in a scenic city overlooking the Namhae Sea, the Sacheon rest stop restaurant was once known for its eclectic seafood dishes. But in June, the restaurant will install robot chefs to make ramen.

At Mumank, Park Young-sook, 65, worked as a hostess and waitress for 12 years before transitioning into a role as head of kitchen. While the robots have eased her workload, learning to work alongside them has been a challenge, she told Rest of World. 

“Without our input, the robots can’t operate on their own,” she said.

Every day, Park stocks the machines with ingredients, loads bowls and plates into dispensers, and adds garnishes too delicate for the robots to handle. She also oversees the robots’ cooking, stepping in when their arms freeze or the timing spirals out of sync. When the robots splatter ramen onto the conveyor belt, she scrambles to mop it up while customers yell at her over delayed service, she said. 

After the layoffs in February 2024, “some of the kitchen staff even quit because they couldn’t get used to the menial nature of working alongside the robots,” Park said.

Still, Park is learning to use tablets, and to keep pace with machines that speak in beeps, as finding a new job at her age is difficult. She is grateful that, for now, the robots still need her help — but that may not be the case for long.

“I guess when the robots become really advanced, we’ll all become useless,” she said.