Alex Vardakostas had a dream about creating a robot burger-maker in college. He's now poised to open a restaurant with his Creator Burger robot in September. Alex Vardakostas had a dream about creating a robot burger-maker in college. He's now poised to open a restaurant with his Creator Burger robot in September. An audience gathers around the transparent 14-foot-long "culinary instrument" in a restaurant called Creator in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood.

Arriving at Creator, a new restaurant located on the ground floor of an office building on downtown San Francisco's Folsom Street, feels like walking into a catalog. Sleek, wooden communal tables with high white stools line one end of the room, with a bookshelf full of hand-picked culinary books against the wall and modern light fixtures overhead. It's what you would have imagined a restaurant eventually looking like if you watched a lot of The Jetsons. Those machines, with large transparent glass casings and ingredients in cylindrical tubes, are Creator's burger-making robots. Each 14-foot device contains around 350 sensors and 20 microcomputers to produce the best, freshest, locally sourced cheeseburger that $6 can get you in America's most expensive city.

On June 27, he and Steven Frehn, a mechanical engineer, will open Creator, a San Francisco burger shop where a robot preps, cooks and assembles your meal. Creator is betting that robotic efficiency and consistency, combined with techniques borrowed from Michelin-star chefs, will lead to a better burger--for the relatively affordable price of $6. The restaurant is designed with the muted colors and clean lines of a luxury home-goods store. All the better to focus on the real stars: two 14-foot-long burger-making machines, each comprised of roughly 7,000 parts, including hundreds of sensors. Buns, tomatoes, onions, pickles, seasonings and sauces are stored in clear tubes, which sit over a copper conveyor belt on a wooden base carved into Zaha-Hadid-style swooping lines.

San Francisco is ground zero for tech companies, from social media to bioengineering. It's also a city obsessed with food, and often the first destination for international chains like Michelin-starred Tsuta Ramen to break into the U.S. market. It's a city teeming with early adopters and forward thinkers, like the team behind Creator, both a restaurant and a culinary robotics company that will offer the world's first robot-made burgers when it opens June 27. It's an all-inclusive burger-making device that accomplishes every part of the burger's preparation, from slicing and toasting the brioche buns to grinding meat and searing the burger to order in five minutes. It's also an incredibly advanced engineering achievement.

Growing up, my job was to make hundreds of the same burger over and over,

Weeks after he was born, Alex Vardakostas' mother strapped him into a baby carrier and went back to work flipping burgers at A's, the Southern California fast-food restaurant that she and her husband owned. When Vardakostas was a toddler, the town's local newspaper, Dana Point News, ran a photograph of him peering through the restaurant's walk-up window. As he grew older, he often played in the back of the kitchen among pallets of hamburger buns while his parents worked. At 8, he started filling drink orders, standing on top of a milk crate to reach the soda machine. Sometimes he ran food experiments, soaking burger meat in Worcestershire sauce to see if it would taste better.