SAN FRANCISCO (TIP): There’s a new quinoa restaurant in San Francisco where customers order, pay and receive their food and never interact with a person.

The restaurant, Eatsa, is almost fully automated. There are no waiters or even an order taker behind a counter. There are unseen people helping to prepare the food, but there are plans to fully automate that process too.

For optimists, it’s a way to make restaurant-going more efficient and less expensive.For pessimists, it’s the latest example of how machines are stealing people’s jobs.Either way , it’s like heaven for misanthropes, or those who are in too much of a hurry to chat with a server. “I would call it different than a restaurant. Its like a food delivery system,” said David Friedberg, founder of Eatsa.

One gets to browse the menu on a flat-screen monitor. Then you tap in your order through an iPad, custo mize it and pay. Your name then appears on another screen, and when the food is ready , a number shows up next to it. It corresponded to a cubby where the food soon appears. The cubbies are behind transparent LCD screens that go black when the food is deposited, so no signs of human presence are visible.