Dubai to Launch ‘AI Restaurant’

The new WOOHOO restaurant in Dubai will offer dishes crafted by artificial intelligence, according to Reuters.

WOOHOO positions itself as a venue offering a “dining experience of the future.” The opening is scheduled for September in central Dubai, near the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa.

While chefs will prepare the food, the culinary language model Aiman will be responsible for the menu, ambiance, and service. Aiman is trained on “decades of food science research, molecular composition data, and over a thousand recipes from culinary traditions worldwide.”

Although the neural network cannot smell, taste, or interact with its dishes like a regular chef, it deconstructs cuisine into elements—texture, acidity, umami—and combines them into unique flavor and ingredient pairings.

The resulting prototypes are then refined by human chefs, who taste the product and provide feedback. The project will be led by renowned Dubai chef Reif Othman.

“Their reactions to my suggestions help refine my understanding of what works beyond pure data,” Aiman explained in an interview via an interactive interface.

The creators of the model emphasized that they do not aim to replace the human element in cooking. They seek to complement it.

“Human cooking will not disappear, but we believe Aiman will help elevate ideas and creativity,” noted project co-founder Oytun Cakir.

Aiman will also be used to create recipes utilizing ingredients that restaurants typically discard—such as meat trimmings or fat.

In the long term, WOOHOO’s founders believe that Aiman could be licensed to restaurants worldwide to reduce kitchen waste and enhance the industry’s sustainability.

Back in 2024, McDonald’s tested an AI solution from IBM for automated order taking. The results did not satisfy the company.