For those of you who might be interested, Russ, Brett, Miki and I went to uWink this past weekend.  In case you hadn't heard, it's basically a video-game based restaurant in the Promenade mall.  Since I had received a card for a free appetizer, we figured it was worth giving the place a shot.

My first impression of the place is that it looks like a bunch of tables sitting between undecorated white walls that have the photo albums of a teenage girl projected onto them.  The tables themselves have large, intrusive touch-screen monitors that basically make cross-table conversation and interaction pointless while taking away space that could be used to hold the food.  I couldn't imagine trying to share appetizers or deserts with the whole table in any sort of simple way.

The system is somewhat cool in that you place your orders completely without waiters.  You just pick the food items you want on the monitors and then adjust the order according to what you want on the side, what you want left off, and what you want extra of.  This is cool because it means you won't be surprised by your dish and it is pretty prompt but it also means that you have to pace yourself on the ordering because we ended up getting our appetizer a few minutes after our main dish because we orderred them all at once.  It also means that you have to "order" refills and such because there are no roaming waiters which can be annoying even if they do respond to your order (which, needless to say, our waiter didn't).

The food was damned good (which isn't so surprising considering it was around $9 for a burger).  Russell actually got the $9.50 mac and cheese and hated it because they put sun-dried tomatoes on it which, sure, he could have ordered it without, but that would have killed the experience.  I had a wonderful turkey burger with some damned tasty sweet potato fries and Miki liked her turkey sandwich.  I wanted to get the Crispy Tuna Sushi Rolls for our appetizer but Miki refused to get anything but the most expensive appetizer if we were getting it for free so we compromised on some hummus with olives on top.  The hummus was okay but the trendy fad of using vegetables and chips instead of pita really made it less than it could have been.

The video game aspect of the monitors was okay if you like trivia and simple touch-screen games but it did feel like it was more isolating than it was communal.  The fact that there was next to nothing that made use of the two monitors that were sitting back to back at our table felt like they should have taken far longer to beta test the system before charging full price for the experience.

If they could overhaul the system, make it more communal and less isolating, and make sure that the wait staff gets and reacts to all orders in a reasonable fashion, it might be a cool place.  The only problem is that I doubt that it will be done before the novelty wears off...