Robotic woks could be the future of gastronomy in Los Angeles and beyond

One of the best dishes I ate last month was a paper plate of fried rice prepared by a robot named Robby.

The grains were smeared with soy sauce, each caramelized and tinged with smoke. Generously studded with strands of soft scrambled eggs, golden lap cheong, plump shrimp and chopped scallions, it was a fried rice dish that could have come from the worn-out wok in my grandmother's kitchen. Instead, he was standing in a trailer in the parking lot of a company called Next Robot in Walnut.

Next Robot creates and manufactures robotic kitchen machinery, including Robby, a 550-pound automated wok capable of preparing 17.64 pounds of food at a time.

It looks like a large vertical washing machine drum that holds the food and spins it while it cooks. Above, next to and below the drum are hidden compartments containing various condiments and sauces that automatically drop into the wok according to specific recipes. No fire is required, and the wok reaches temperatures up to 700 degrees Fahrenheit.

Your own Robby is available for around $1,200 a month, with a three-year lease.

The company is part of a global robotic cooking market expected to be valued at more than $9 billion over the next decade, with dozens of companies making everything from fully automated kitchens to robotic arms that mimic the movements of a human chef.

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Robby is programmed to speak English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, French and Korean, but can speak any language if requested in less than an hour. It's a machine that can make fried rice like my grandmother's, but it still needs a human to operate it, at least for now.

I watched as Nguyen Bui, culinary director at Next Robot, selected a recipe from a screen in Robby, causing the machine to offer a list of ingredients. The wok began to heat up and become seasoned with oil that shot out of a compartment above the wok. Over the course of about four minutes, Robby told Bui when to load each ingredient, with a countdown on the screen to indicate the time between each step. The rice rotated around the drum and Bui added the sausage, eggs and shrimp when asked. Once the rice was finished and removed from the wok, Robby pressure washed it.

“It's important to preserve these traditional dishes that are difficult to prepare,” says Giggs Huang, co-founder and CEO of Next Robot. “And we can do it with the help of artificial intelligence, machinery and robotics.”

Huang, who has a background in e-commerce, says the idea for Robby came from a love of restaurant dining. After listening to several friends in the industry, Huang and his partners created an automated stir-fry machine designed to replicate wok hei, or the complex smoky flavor you get from cooking in a wok at high temperatures. It is a technique that incorporates precise control of temperature and time, and a lot of practice. Robby is designed to do it right every time.

“Our restaurant friends are struggling due to operational inefficiency issues,” he says. “We start with stir-frying because it's difficult. All the prep work can be standardized, but the technical part can be very difficult.”

A selection of dishes made with the automatic wok at the Tigawok restaurant in Burbank.

(Jenn Harris/Los Angeles Times)

One of those friends was Tomas Su, who was the first to design a restaurant around Robby in the kitchen. Su and partner Kelvin Wang opened the first Tigawok in Sawtelle in 2024, just months after Robby was ready. It's a restaurant that offers miniature bowls of a wide variety of familiar Chinese American dishes, such as orange peel chicken and chow mein, but also mapo tofu and red braised pork belly. Robby prepares ingredients in a central kitchen and cooks them at the restaurant's various locations.

In the past year and a half, Su and Wang have opened three Tigawok locations and plan to open two additional restaurants in the next two months. It's a pace of expansion that Su says he couldn't achieve without Robby's help.

“When you think about a restaurant chain with multiple locations, people complain about inconsistencies in locations,” Su says. “This problem will kill your brand if you have 10 to 15 locations. Robby-style cooking machines solve this problem.”

But while Tigawok may now be in hyper-expansion mode, Su says there were problems with the machines from the beginning. Due to the non-stick coating on the woks, they needed to be replaced every one to two weeks. After informing Huang and his team, the woks were changed to carbon steel and now last up to three years.

“That's more than a normal kitchen wok,” Su says.

There are currently 300 Robbys operating around the world in around 100 different companies. There is an airline catering company that uses Robby to prepare hundreds of pounds of scrambled eggs each morning to service several airlines. The Coronado School District uses Robby in its central kitchen to prepare everything from kung pao chicken to Philly cheesesteaks for its students.

Huang is using real-time feedback from the school, airline, and restaurants to make continuous improvements to Robby and its software. But some of the biggest comments come from Bui, a private chef who previously cooked at some of the state's most acclaimed restaurants, including Commis in Oakland and Rustic Canyon in Los Angeles. Bui is what Huang calls a superuser, focused on developing recipes and testing the machines' limits.

“Creatively, I think it's really empowering because, ironically, I don't know how to use a wok,” Bui says. “But it's given me the ability to make dishes that require great wok skill. That fried rice, I wouldn't know how to have that wok hei and that uniformity, but I can understand the robot and I can make recipes around that.”

During a visit to the Next Robot warehouse, Bui prepared carbonara, scrambled eggs and risotto in Next Robot's newest machine, Al Dente. Thinner than Robby, it's a unique pan with an automated arm that loads ingredients and stirs whatever's in the pan.

Nguyen Bui, culinary director of Next Robot, prepares risotto.

(Chiara Alexa / For The Times)

“One thing I had trouble with Al Dente was flipping the food, because the way the arms are, it would just move the food sideways and sometimes there would be a problem where the top wouldn't cook,” Bui says. “I let Giggs know, gave him some ideas and we had a prototype of a new arm in about a month and a half.”

For Bui, and for most chefs, achieving consistency in each dish is Robby and Al Dente's greatest flexibility.

“Unless you train someone to actually use a wok and have enough experience, it's very inconsistent,” says Bryant Ng, chef and owner of Jade Rabbit, a Chinese-American fast-casual restaurant in Santa Monica. “The hardest thing for all restaurants is to be consistent. I could see how this [Robby] “It could be a big help.”

While machines can be useful, they inevitably raise the uncomfortable question of where to draw the line. If a machine can cook for us, will it completely replace chefs in the kitchen?

Ng and his wife Kim were behind Cassia, the innovative Santa Monica restaurant that for nearly a decade dazzled diners with Ng's singular style of Chinese, Vietnamese and Singaporean cuisine. It was a restaurant that won every award imaginable, but was forced to close in early 2025 when operating costs skyrocketed.

At Jade Rabbit, Ng has two woks in his kitchen, operated by two cooks. For him, the possibility of an addition like Robby is not about eliminating people, but about streamlining operations.

“If I could rebuild Jade Rabbit today, I would put in a traditional wok and one of the robots and still have the same number of people to free them up to do more tasks that aren't necessarily cooking,” Ng says.

For Next Robot, Robby and Al Dente are just the beginning. The company is already working on developing a smaller version of Robby and thinking about an automatic grill. Huang says he could introduce platform services that allow chefs to develop recipes that they can sell exclusively to users or charge for use through Robby or Al Dente.

“We have to live with AI,” says Huang. “It's not our competitor, but something we can use to work efficiently as a tool. We just need to adapt quickly enough.”