The short life of the Roboshef
In 1940 the restaurant trade magazine Restaurant Management ran a story about a new San Francisco restaurant called Roboshef where one presumably unskilled cook could turn out 120 meals an hour. The feat was accomplished by using an automatic cooker that rapidly cooked steaks, fish, potatoes, and biscuits in hot oil. (Opening 1939 announcement below.)
The counter-sized cooker (shown above), the Roboshef, was patented by Walter Scharsch, a chef who had previously run his own restaurant.
The Roboshef menu also included juices, salads, vegetables, soup, and desserts, all prepared conventionally. On the menu, a half chicken with French fries and hot rolls was priced at 60c.
In 1935, prior to opening the San Francisco location, Scharsch had spent some time demonstrating his invention in Portland OR. A story that ran in the local paper described him demonstrating the invention in a local auditorium (shown above). Local production of the machine, said the story, had begun that same day. It said the plan was to open the machine to distribution in Oregon, Washington, and California before going national. I could find no evidence that Roboshef restaurants ever opened in Washington or Oregon.
The invention had appeared first in Tiny’s Waffle Shop in San Francisco in early 1938. Next came the Roboshef restaurant described in Restaurant Management, with its grand opening in July of 1939. According to the trade magazine’s story, the business planned to dedicate the upper two floors of the Van Ness location to a commissary and an office.
And then what happened after 1939?
Nothing, nothing at all. The Restaurant Management story was the last trace of Roboshef.
Except for this, which appeared months before Restaurant Management’s 1940 story – on Nov. 26, 1939:
It does not list any restaurant equipment, but seems to be referring to what would have been in the upstairs office. However the restaurant must have closed then or not much later, because by April, 1940, two months before the Restaurant Management story, a Persian rug store had moved into the space formerly occupied by the restaurant.
So it seems that Restaurant Management had presented a new restaurant – that had already failed!
Why did the San Francisco Roboshef go out of business so quickly? I could not find any explanation. My guess is that the invention did not work properly. That might explain why Scharsch submitted a new design for a similar yet different “Food Cooking Unit” to the U.S. patent office in 1941.
The new version of the Roboshef was acquired by Cogrisch Products which christened it the “Cogrisch Chicken Fryer.” Two advertisements from 1941 exclaimed about using it to cook chicken, one at the Nip & Tuck Chicken Inn in San Diego and the other at Earl’s Tavern & Chicken Shack in Tulare CA. There may have been others. Both the Nip & Tuck and an unknown place in Tracy CA advertised their used Cogrisch fryers for sale in 1950.
Meanwhile, Walter Scharsch had gone on to work for a shipbuilding corporation and to invent a Butter Slicing and Dispensing Machine around 1945.
© Jan Whitaker, 2025
