Would you try ‘dinosaur tartare’ created by the world’s first AI chef?,
With ‘dinosaur tartare’ and ‘seaweed butter’ on the menu, it’s clear that this restaurant isn’t doing things normally.
However, the brains behind these bizarre dishes isn’t a mad cook, but the world’s first AI chef.
At WooHoo in Dubai, the eccentric menu has been crafted by a computer programme known as Chef Aiman.
But would you be brave enough to try any of this computer’s cooking?
Although Chef Aiman isn’t physically preparing dishes in the kitchen, the restaurant says that each dish is ‘shaped by his AI-powered planning and recipe development’.
The strangest of these AI-generated creations is WooHoo’s mysteriously named ‘dinosaur tartare’.
According to the restaurant, this is meant to ‘recreate the taste of extinct reptiles’.
Priced at £44, the dish supposedly tastes like a blend of raw meats and is served on a pulsating plate that appears to be breathing.
Despite the fascinating name, WooHoo has remained cagey about the real contents of their dinosaur tartare.
The restaurant has not revealed the recipe but the menu does confirm that it contains duck.
Other strange menu items include seaweed butter, served with Wagyu beef cooked in a Japanese clay pot, priced at £41.
While that might sound unusual, seaweed is actually extremely high in naturally occurring MSG.
This is the chemical which gives food its savoury or ‘umami’ flavour, making it an impressive natural flavour enhancer.
However, even the most adventurous eaters might be put off by the baked ‘baby chicken’ served ‘on cedar wood’.
This likely refers to a very young chicken, also known as a poussin, typically killed at just 28 days old.
Although the AI chef lacks any sense of taste, the restaurant’s owners insist that these dishes created by Chef Aiman should be delicious.
According to WooHoo, the AI has been trained on thousands of recipes and decades of culinary research and molecular gastronomy.
The bot then uses ‘data on taste combinations, food chemistry, and guest preferences’ to create its dishes.
Ahmet Oytun Cakir, co-founder of WooHoo, says that his Chef Aiman will one day become ‘the next Gordon Ramsay – but AI’.
He adds: ‘AI is going to create better dishes than humans, maybe in the future.’
For today, however, the cooking process still needs some human input.
At WooHoo, the final presentation and cooking are still overseen by chef Serhat Karanfil, who admits that he does not always agree with the AI’s decisions.
Mr Karanfil says: ‘If I taste it, for example, and it is too spicy, I talk to Chef Aiman again. After we discuss, we find the right balance.’
But not everyone is so enthusiastic about the prospects of working with AI in the kitchen.
Michelin-starred chef Mohamad Orfali told AFP: ‘There is no such thing as an AI chef. I don’t believe in it.’
Mr Orfali added that he believes cooking requires ‘nafas’, an Arabic term for a cook’s ‘soul’ or personal flair and creativity.
He says: ‘Artificial intelligence lacks feelings and memories; in short, it has no nafas… It can’t imbue it into food.’
Luckily for chefs, the data agrees that kitchen workers aren’t likely to be replaced with bots any time soon.
A study from the University of Oxford found that chefs were among the least likely jobs to be automated by AI.
Out of 366 jobs, chefs were the 213th least likely to be replaced by AI in the future.
Likewise, a recent study conducted by Microsoft found that chefs had an extremely low ‘AI compatibility’ score, meaning artificial intelligence is unlikely to help them in their work.
The study found that cooks were about as likely to be replaced with AI as police, funeral home workers, and healthcare practitioners.
