“The iPad is already a tasty product among gadget lovers, but a North Sydney restaurant has become the first in Australia to replace their printed menus with Apple’s new touch screen device,” Stephen Fenech reports for News.com.au. “Global Mundo Tapas in the North Sydney Rydges Hotel yesterday introduced a custom-made iPad application which allows customers to browse the virtual pages of the menu with a sweep of their finger.”
“Diners can peruse the dishes and see a picture of what the dish looks like along with tasting notes before compiling their order and sending it wirelessly to the kitchen,” Fenech reports. “The iPad menu can also suggest the best wines to go with certain dishes and suggest the best food pairings.”
Fenech reports, “When ordering steak, users can even specify how they’d like the meat cooked and which sauce they’d prefer. It will even ask them if they’d like fries with that.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: In some darkened Vegas hotel room, Bill Gates is muttering about pen-based input as his fingernails grow out of control.
i live and work 5 minutes from there but have never been there yet. guess ill be a regular now lol
$2.13 an hour????
Man, that sounds a little bit like the third world to me…
tipping is just bribery
do u tip police?
politicians?
Tipping Culture = Bribery Culture
What MDN talking about Bill Gates muttering of Pen Based input??
Bill Gates wants restaurants to use the Big A$$ Table.
I like the poster who could expand on the whole menu idea when he/she talked about calorie counting. That’s huge. Just fill in your order and tap on the calorie button.
Or tap on the calorie/carbs/grams button at the top to have the menu change to add those in the listing of each menu item.
Or just tap vegan, or vegetarian, or breakfast, etc. and have the menu reformat for just what you’re looking for.
Frankly, in many restaurants here where I live, the menu is colourful and beautiful but there are two hundreds items and it makes it harder for me to find and make up my mind.
If written well, I can see an iPad “menu” being HUGE!
Because it can add SO many other things to the menu that wouldn’t be viable on a printed menu i.e. the calories, credit card payment right from the menu, order your coffee refill as soon as you want it, compliment the staff, fill out a comment card, stats for the restaurant on what is moving and what the profits are… I could go on and on… I’m just too lazy to type out all of the things that one “MENU” could do for any establishment.
Oh, and when you’re sitting waiting for your appetizer, how about viewing the rooms in the hotel, or the points of interest around the area, or…….. get my drift?
Greg
This is just the beginning of great uses for the iPad. And the “Bill Gates take” is priceless.
@LukeinOz,
Part of what contributes to the U.S. system is our federal income tax code (state and local income taxes may also contribute their share of headaches depending on where one lives) which, if one works in a restaurant, assumes one makes a certain percentage of one’s income from tips and owes taxes on said assumed income… whether or not actually made said income in tips.
This is the same federal government that establishes minimum wage requirements… and exempts restaurants from paying them to wait staff because the government assumes that wait staff makes up the difference in tips.
Despite it’s flaws, however, many relatives and friends working in the restaurant biz have been able to make better money than my father, who was a highly paid tool and die repairman for a U.S. automaker.
BTW, I share your attitude about tipping and that is exactly how I tip here in the U.S. I don’t tip based on expectations or how little a waiter/waitress might be paid by the restaurant.