It’s not every day you walk into a Wichita restaurant and see a robot serving tables, but that’s the case as Bella the cat robot rolls through the restaurant Ninza in east Wichita.
Colbin Carnahan describes the high-tech feline as “about four to four and a half feet tall, cylindrical in shape, with little cat ears on top, with a screen that kind of portrays her cat-like face.” The machine can do a number of things, including rolling around and serving multiple platforms of food and drinks.
Carnahan has been involved in the restaurant industry since 2013 and is currently a multi-unit front-of-house manager at locally owned restaurants, including Ninza Sushi East, Ninza Sushi West and Blue Fin Sake Bar & Sushi in Wichita’s Old Town. The restaurants are owned and operated by wife Ada Yang and her husband, Seong Han.
Carnahan said Bella can be programmed with specific messages that pop up on the screen when she arrives at a table. There are also prompts she might say and a selection of options. She’s been operational at Ninza Sushi East since 2023.
“It’s a very lengthy process to get it fully done where you are happy and that it’s safe,” Carnahan said. “You actually have to map out her pathing, and what that means simply is that the robot’s not going to know how to get to a table on its own. So, you basically have to drag the robot around in a pathing program to show exactly what type of pathing you want it to take for every table, in every scenario.”
Server Hong pulls plates of food down for delivery off the service counter. She carefully places the items on one of Bella’s trays just before the robot turns and rolls toward hungry customers.
Jesse Escalante, his wife, Sol, and their daughter, Emily, enjoy eating at the restaurant and getting food delivered by Bella. Escalante is impressed by their robotic feline server.
“It’s a nice change, or as long as it’s not replacing actual jobs, if it’s helpful, then I don’t really mind it,” Escalante said. “I actually enjoy the idea of having robots because I like robots.”
Four-year-old Emily grabs the yellow chopstick helper Hong offers her. She also likes having access to the robot.
“The robot has a cat face with a nose, and I can pet it!” Emily said as she reached for the robot’s ears.
Bella laughs and responds, “It feels so itchy, meow.”
“You can just tell when kids are just having a blast with something,” Carnahan said. He has seen that reaction at the east-side restaurant.
“Just the hysterical laughter and wows, and ‘Oh, I want to do this, and I want to do that. Can I do this? Can I do that?’ It was really rewarding, and I could tell the parents appreciated it,” he said.
Carnahan believes the whole point of hospitality is the human interaction, the service and the hospitality itself.
“If we are constantly striving to take that away,” Carnahan said, “it detracts from the experience of going out to eat, and I think I really understand that approach. However, Bella is really just kind of a — you press a button and she goes and does her thing on wheels. She’s never going to be able to replace a human being, nor would I ever want that.”
And what does Bella represent right now? Not the end of human service, but a small glimpse at what a restaurant of the future could look like.
