Al's Wait & Eat
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Al's Wait & Eat is a curious establishment. Its target customer base is Transferred Consciousnesses like Wave Convoy, and other infomorphs with a highly developed awareness of the human senses. While it does have a normal eat-in seating area (why turn away business?), what inspired Al to open his diner was the accidental creation of the Culinary Scanner, a device that uses whatever foodstuff is put into it to create a holoprogram/simsense record that mimics that food item perfectly, down to its relationship with time and the environment. This program can be paused at will (leftovers keep forever) and adjusted to match the customer's perception of time, but it can't be restarted.
As befits his position as leader of his local convivium (read: chapter) of Slow Food, Al refuses to sell the same meal twice or create a stockpile of holo-dishes: everything is made to order and as near as possible from scratch. This means that service is always excruciatingly slow from an infomorph's perspective, but also that the food is always fresh, delicious, and subtly different from the last time you had it.
Staff Quirks
Dedicated Roleplayer: The only people Al regularly interacts with in person are the other members of his convivium. He otherwise lives in Cyberspace, where his avatar is a One Binome. Rumour has it that he's an infomorph himself. He isn't, but he's so thoroughly cyborged that a biomod would probably turn him into a Transferred Consciousness.
Dumb Waiter: Al is the chef and the only sapient member of the staff. All the waitstaff are simple robots, with an extremely sophisticated natural language parser driving a complex but entirely rigid if-then-else decision tree.
Say What?!: For a variety of reasons, Al sometimes tunes people out without meaning to. When he realizes that he's missed something he should respond to, he plays up his fandom inspiration and says (shouts, if circumstances permit) "WHAAAT?!".
Culinary Scanner Quirks
Om Nom Nom: The Culinary Scanner consumes its input. As is usually the case with handwavium devices, nobody knows where the mass goes.
Picky Eater: The Culinary Scanner has a dot-matrix LCD display. If someone attempts to scan something that fails to qualify as "food" or "beverage", it will display a relevant message; mechanically inedible items (things made of stone, plastic, wood, etc.) provoke a simple "You can't eat that" (unless it's toy food, in which case it references the Lemon Demon song with "Not real food; do not eat"); trying to scan something that is ingestible but contains a dangerous amount of any substance will result in the message "You lied when you told me this was edible".
