A couple of friends and I have been trying to get together to go to a park for awhile now. And every time we’ve tried we failed. Due to some reason or another. We meet up but we never make it to the park. So this time I decided to find things closer to the park for us to meet at before going and it kinda worked. We started at cafe.bot which is a newish cafe that boasts a robot helper barista, bartender, and artist. It’s really easy to get to from the Seongsu station exit 2.
It’s also not hard to miss, seeing as once direct sunlight hits the outside of the building it’s blindingly bright. When we arrived it wasn’t so bad but when we left we all turned to get pictures of the front and sort of stumbled around blindly for a bit. Nearly tripping on the small step to get back onto the road. So wear sunglasses.
I think I was expecting an explosion of robots a bit like the robot hotel in Tokyo. However they have only a couple. I’d say there’s four robots, three as staff and one pretending to be a flamingo. The flamingo robot was actually a camera that followed anyone who came near it. Kind of creepy.
One of the robots is an art robot that decorates a specific style of cake they sell with only a select amount of options. Even though both flavor and art options are limited it’s still kinda cool to see and watch. A friend got one to take pictures of to send to her sister whose birthday it was. She picked out the green or chlorella verde cake with the celebration design.
The other robots were drink robots, and none of us put those robots to work because the selection of items they made weren’t things we necessarily wanted. I ordered a coconut cake (선인장마들렌 which translates to cactus madeleine) which was bright blue with a little dropper sticking out of it which usually connotes an alcoholic infusion, and a green tea latte. (4,000 won and 6,500 won respectively.)
Watching the robot draw was quite fun but the verde cake wasn’t really our favorite. It was chocolate with chlorella which is essentially algae, which is probably why we didn’t like it. It was cool to try but now I know I don’t like algae cake. It was also wrapped in plastic, so make sure to remove that first, and a bit more mousse like in texture than cake like. The coconut cake with the mystery infusion however was amazing and we demolished that fairly quickly while we sat and chatted.
The other options for decorative Moji cakes (between 8,000-9,000 won each) were: rainbow which was cream cheese cake sheet, chocolat which was chocolate cheese, and rosa which was raspberry mango. I’m wondering now if they’re meant to be more like cheesecake. Note that while it looks like a touch screen for choosing your design it actually isn’t so just tell the staff what design you want. (We were a bit embarrassed trying to poke at the tablet only for nothing to happen.) They also offer a small array of pastries.
As for drinks the drip robot makes mostly just coffee which isn’t something I particularly enjoy while a different drink bot makes cocktails, beers and wine . Essentially look on their menu for things marked with “bot” to figure out what will get a robot to help make it.
They also have a different art installation/ video happening along one wall which can be fun to watch and several people come to take pictures with it. It changes so whenever you pop by something new might be happening. There seemed to be a festive flamingo event happening while we were there, probably for a tail end of summer vibe. Even the free self-serve water was pink.
For weekdays cafe bot is open from 8am until 10pm and during the weekends cafe bot is open from 10am until 10pm. If you’re curious about their current art or just more information you can find their Instagram here.