“Automats were right up there with the Statue of Liberty and Madison Square Garden,” Kent L. Barwick, former president of the Municipal Art Society, lamented to the New York Times in 1991 when the ...

Automats are like vending machines where you insert coins or swipe a card to get hot food. They boomed in the US in the middle of the last century but have now disappeared. They are thriving in the ...

Joshua David Stein is a New York-based journalist, author, food critic, and editor. Eatsa recently opened off the Embarcadero in San Francisco, with a wall of LCD screens, compartments full of quinoa ...

It was once the world’s largest restaurant chain, serving 800,000 people a day. It was Horn & Hardart, and its cavernous, waiterless establishments represented a combination of fast-food, vending and ...

Once considered the future of dining, automats embraced both convenience and novelty. The self-service restaurants were first introduced in the early 20th century and required customers to insert ...

For introverts since the dawn of time, eating out has presented a set of problems — mainly, having to interact with other humans in order to get your hands on a simple turkey sandwich. For a brief ...

Some restaurateurs in the New York City metropolitan area are looking to the past to figure out the future of dining during the coronavirus pandemic. The automat, a concept developed more than a ...

One NYC restaurateur is looking to bring automats — where customers can order and get food without interacting with anyone — back into fashion with a new dumpling shop that’s set to debut in the East ...