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  3. The menu at Spyce, which opens today in downtown Boston, isn’t noticeably dif

The menu at Spyce, which opens today in downtown Boston, isn’t noticeably dif

游客2023-12-30  41
问题    The menu at Spyce, which opens today in downtown Boston, isn’t noticeably different than the menus you’d find at a half-dozen other quick-service lunch places within a three-block radius. It’s filled with grain bowls with brown rice and freekeh, mix-ins including pomegranate, chicken, and kale, and toppings such as avocado, egg, and yogurt.
   But what sets Spyce apart from the Dig Inn two doors down or the two Sweetgreens within a stone’s throw is who — or, rather, what — cooks the food. The star culinarian at Spyce is a nine-foot long, 14-foot wide robotic kitchen — so, not really an employee at all.
   The machine wirelessly collects multiple orders from a bank of self-service menu kiosks, displays the names of the guests whose orders are being prepared, pipes the various ingredients from refrigerated hoppers into a spinning wok to be cooked and tossed, and dumps the hot meal into a compostable bowl waiting on the counter below. Only then does a human handle any part of your meal, adding fresh ingredients and handing over the order, a process designed to take as few as three minutes.
   But, despite the small number of humans involved, Spyce’s co-owners appear to be taking the human touch quite seriously.
   "At the end of the day, a restaurant is all about hospitality and, obviously, how good the food is, " says Spyce’s COO Kale Rogers, who built an early prototype of the robotic kitchen with his three current business partners in the basement of their fraternity house at MIT. "We see the automation as a tool to allow us to serve incredible quality to more people. A necessary component is the human touch — the presentation, the personalization, the handing it to you with a smile."
   Spyce’s robotic system, plus a number of other recent advances in restaurant automation, may raise questions about the culinary future we want. They’re questions easily recognized in nearly every sector from driverless cars in the automotive industry to self-checkout in grocery stores. Will replacing cooks with robots or cashiers with computers be good for the nation’s often-undervalued food workers? Or will it just make them obsolete?
   Restaurant industry leaders have blamed fair pay movements like Fight for $15 for the rise of restaurant automation, with the assumption that more robots equals fewer human workers. But some workforce advocates note that automation may actually end up being beneficial to restaurant workers.
   In developing Spyce, Rogers and his co-founders had a lot to learn from less-successful experiments in automation over the last several years.
   For one, they brought on renowned chef Daniel Boulud, who drew from his Michelin-rated restaurants for design and flow. Along with executive chef Sam Benson, Boulud helped develop Spyce’s menu. Boulud and Benson also convinced the co-founders, who may have been leaning more robot-centric, to place two French-inspired garde mangers at the front counter to garnish the bowls. Two more employees roam the front-of-house, welcoming guests and helping troubleshoot any snags with the kiosk ordering system. A handful of additional human workers prepare ingredients at an off-site commissary kitchen.
   Kale Rogers, co-founder and chief operating officer, wouldn’t say what Spyce is paying its workers — though Boston’s minimum wage is $11 an hour, so assume employees make at least that much — but he acknowledged that customer service is key to creating an environment to which the lunch crowd wants to return week after week. [br] The word "incredible" underlined in Paragraph 5 is closest in meaning to______.
选项 A、incredulous
B、fine
C、strange
D、impossible
答案 B
解析 “incredible”在这里意思为“极好的”。B项fine符合题意；A项为“不相信的、不轻信的”，C项为“奇怪的”，D项为“不可能的”，均不符合题意。答案为B。
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