The first thing you need to know about this place is it is new, and when I say new, I mean new.
The entire area is a new development with very little of it actually complete.
I made a booking through their Facebook page as the email on their website does not work. The website is confusing at best with next to no images of the actual restaurant and a convoluted menu. But robots! How could I resist?
When the time came to get ourselves to the shopping center that the restaurant is within, we couldn’t find anyone who actually knew where it was. We ended up getting a nice young lady in a travel booking shop to look up the directions online (the one useful bit of info on the website) and explain to a taxi driver where it was. He over charged us quite a bit. Taxi drivers don’t like going places they’ve never heard of.
“Mo-no-po-ly” park is a newly built shopping center. Inside is space for little stores and restaurants but so far it only has 2 restaurants, 2 bars and a hair dresser. Other shops are filled with stock in boxes but obviously not ready to start serving customers.
When we arrived and entered the restaurant we were ignored for a minute before a surly waitress finally addressed us. The first thing she did was bluntly tell us that we couldn’t have buffet. “Fine,” I said, “I have a booking for Shabou”.
“No, no. We don’t have buffet,”
“We don’t want buffet, I have booking,”
“No, no. We cannot.”
I grabbed a menu, flicked to the shabou al a cart and pointed. Eyes rolled and she led us to a table.
As we walked into the dinning room I was surprised to see that the robots were behind large glass dividers, and you couldn’t see into the kitchen where robots were apparently preparing food.
They gave us no explanation of how to order, luckily I have used a digital menu before so could basically figure it out. We ordered some meats, vegetables and our drinks. The drinks were served by human staff and our bowl of soup was put on the burner. The rest of the food came out quite quickly after and the robot placed it into a small window that we could take it from and move onto the table. All the robot did was run along a track to our table’s window and place the food down. Exceptionally unimpressive.
The food itself was quite good. The meats were good quality and the vegies fresh (the soup had a little to much fish sauce but it was OK). When we asked for some non-alcoholic beverages they informed us we had to stand and serve ourselves from the buffet table. Really? Really.
We finished up and decided to get the hell out of there as there was nothing else in the area to do. We stood out the front of the shopping center and waved down taxi after taxi who flatly refused to take us back to Sukhumvit. Eventually we walked 10 minutes down the road on the other side and a taxi finally picked us up. This time he was nice and used the meter. It was a third of the price we had payed to get there.
My advice is, unless your really into seeing some “robots” dressed as samurai, give this place a miss, at least for the next few months while the area is under development. I can see it getting better in the future with the addition of more customers and other businesses opening but for right now, it’s just not worth the trouble of getting out there.
