45 minutes for soup? I was cooked lunch by a £50,000 robot

A £50,000 robot chef can prepare your meals without any human intervention – as long as the ingredients are already cut.

Moley Chef’s Table is a new kitchen appliance from Moley Robotics, a London company led by Russian entrepreneur Mark Oleynik.

MailOnline sampled the machine’s creations, including a trendy vegan soup, at the company’s new showroom on Wigmore Street, due to open in the autumn.

Consumers who have the money can buy Chef’s Table for their home, but it’s also intended for airports, hospitals, and even restaurants to help chefs.

It stems from concerns about machines taking over people’s jobs, but the company says the gadget will make a cook’s life easier if they work long hours.

“This can work 24/7 – no chef wants to cook a steak at 2am,” Oleynik, who founded the company in 2015, told MailOnline.

Chef’s Table is not suitable for ‘complicated’ dishes with difficult preparation stages, such as sushi.

Instead, it’s for taking care of the more repetitive or boring aspects of cooking, such as soup that needs to cook or risotto that needs constant stirring.

“I’m not worried about replacing repetitive surgeries because nobody wants to do that,” Oleynik said.

When MailOnline arrives at the Wiley St showroom, Chef’s Table has already prepared the ingredients around it, ready to pick up with its extendable arm.

A claw at the end of the arm clamps utensils and can hang them when finished.

Users can enter any recipes into a companion tablet they want the robot to follow, as long as they require a stovetop (Chef’s Table does not have an oven).

A much larger machine being built in the back of the showroom does have an oven, but it costs even more – between £250,000 and £300,000.

On the menu today is a simple cheese omelet, which starts to cook with a tap on the tablet.

A ladle of egg – cracked and pre-beaten by a human – is taken and transported to the pan, along with grated cheese, though some spill over the hotplate.

The flounder cooks the omelette for about five minutes – though he has some difficulty getting it out of the pan.

It tastes good, but an omelette is pretty hard to mess up even for a robot, so the next thing is a bit more challenging: a soup made from scratch.

Chef’s Table transports chopped carrots, onions and celery to the pan and cooks them carefully before adding sweet potato.

Next comes the coconut milk and vegetable broth, which ends up back on the counter — though I strongly suspect I’d make more of a mess if I followed the same recipe at home.

It takes about half an hour for the ingredients to cook, alternating with occasional stirring – but this is where the human user can go ahead and let the device do its job.

Oleynik said the device “needs no supervision,” so it can cook your meals while you’re sitting on the couch or hanging the laundry.

However, as with any conventional heater, it’s best not to leave it on when you leave the house, especially if you have pets around.

After a torturous wait for a hungry reporter, the robot finally reached for the hand blender and transformed the contents of the pot into a delicious silky smooth soup, which we ate with bread.

I must admit that a total cooking time of 42 minutes seemed a bit much, and if this was in a restaurant kitchen, the chef would probably be yelling at him to “hurry up” with certain expletives.

I think the best setting for Chef’s Table will be airports; I can imagine tapping my card before I leave to pay for a quick robot-made meal, though I’d be careful to choose one of the faster options to avoid missing my flight.

While the sight of such a machine might still seem odd to a member of the public, Oleynik thinks we’ll soon get used to it.

“In 10 years we will see a lot of these machines,” he said. “It’s technology, not magic, like a dishwasher or something.”

“It becomes routine.”