Why don't restaurant kitchens have automatic doors?

I wonder this every time I see a cooking show on TV featuring a real restaurant kitchen. The waiters always have to open heavy swinging doors - usually at least two of them between kitchen and dining room, while holding plates of food. They usually end up opening them with their backside and going backwards or sideways through the door, and it looks as awkward as anything.

Even at a high-end Michelin-starred restaurant that must have cost millions to fit out, it’s the same set-up. Why do none of these places have automatic doors? It seems like it would make things a lot easier. Is it a fire regulation thing?

Think of the problems if the doors break down during dinner.

Manual doors work fine enough, they’re relatively quiet, they’re inexpensive, and they don’t break down.

That would mean they just leave it open.

The OP raises a pretty good question and I think the answer is simply tradition.

The makers of automatic doors haven’t really been presenting designs to work with dinning room aesthetics either.

I’m McDonald’s can manage with drive up windows that break occasionally I’d image a real restaurant could get by too.

I could also see a little kid running through them into the kitchen faster than they can be caught. And then, a lawsuit if anything happens.

Not sure why said kid couldn’t run and open a manual door if they so wished?

Anyway, solution: staff have fobs in their pockets, like keyless entry doodads for cars. Waiter approaches, door opens.

Come on guys, this is the 21st century. My waiter shouldn’t have to be bringing me my grub by pushing open a door with his butt.

I think a sliding door would work best, as they tend to be faster than a swinging design, and also avoid the problem of swinging open into people’s faces.

Plenty of restaurants don’t incorporate doors at all. Open kitchens are even more common in high end restaurants who’d have the most to lose in a lawsuit.

Automatic doors means “those doors which can’t see you if you walk too close, but which keep opening and closing if someone gestures widely in their ‘line of vision’”? They don’t work anywhere near as well as a swinging door, IME - great at driving a little kid crazy, though (“it opens for you but not for me!”).

One of my most regular hangouts has automatic door. They work perfectly OK.

My guess? They’re too slow, especially during the dinner rush.

Transporter for food delivery to the table?:cool:

Or some kind of long-distance audio telecommunication device, by which one could speak to a person in a restaurant some distance away, and have them deliver, say, flat discs of cooked dough topped with a selection of cheeses, meats and sauce - directly to your house!

I’ve seen the future, and it tastes of peperoni. :cool:

The restaurant I worked at this would be the case. We had two doors to and from the kitchen. In and out. Built in special alcoves where you couldn’t mistake which one was the in or out door. Because if you were on the other side of one of these doors during a rush, you’d get hurt. Because a lot of the staff were carrying things, these doors where kicked open and fast.

The amount of times these doors would have to open and close, if they were automatic doors would eventually lead to them breaking down a lot.

Concisely and accurately put.

I’m fairly certain that it would be a fire code violation. You don’t want to be stuck in the kitchen during a fire and have the automatic door fail.

Every automatic door on the market in the US has an emergency feature that allows the door to open manually when pushed with sufficient force. This force is adjustable, but is supposed to be set so that an average person can easily force the door open. Even the sliding glass ones have pins in the tracks that act like hinges so the doors will swing open if pushed.

Exactly. Why spend money for automatic doors if you have a system that works just fine as it is?

You could extend that argument to just about any door. Manual doors on shops also “worked just fine”, and yet the vast majority have automatic doors - and people walking in and out of shops aren’t usually juggling three plates of food at the same time.

Let’s face it, in a high-end restaurant, the cost of a couple of automatic doors would be a drop in the ocean, and it seems like it would save a lot of hassle and dropped food.

I have seen a waiter, walking very fast loaded with empty plates, try to kick open a door not knowing that a “kind” colleague was on the other side blocking it. Much hilarity ensued.

I doubt you’ll see automatic doors installed anywhere that has the rate of traffic as in a high end restaurant. Any malfunction could create a catastrophe. For a restaurant, slowing things down and causing confusion in a short period of time isn’t acceptable. And the evidence is seen in restaurants, where they don’t use automatic doors.