Restaurant charges extra not to meet your lobster
Know where your seafood came from. Pay twelve dollars to forget its name.
SATIRICAL FUTURE NEWS · Imagined events for 30 Oct–5 Nov
1 MIN READ
A seafood restaurant charged diners extra not to learn about their lobster this week, after its new AI tracing service made several customers put their forks down.
At our imaginary restaurant, The Last Supper Club, each lobster arrived with a digital introduction. A scan of its shell brought up its journey to the kitchen. Marketing had added a name, a portrait and a cheerful biography. None of this improved the appetite.
One diner, Martin, had wanted reassurance that his meal came from Tasmania. He had not asked to discover that the restaurant had called it Graham. The waiter had already started describing Graham’s coastal lifestyle when Martin requested the wine list.
The new Just Dinner option cost twelve dollars. It kept the useful information about where the seafood came from, but removed the name, portrait and personal introduction. Staff also stopped referring to the plate as his final destination.
The manager described the service as a response to customer feedback. Guests wanted transparency, apparently, but there was a point at which transparency needed to stop talking.
Martin paid. The waiter closed the biography and wished him an enjoyable meal. Across the table, his wife quietly turned her phone face down.
She had already downloaded Graham’s picture. It was now the family group-chat icon.
What actually happened
ABC reported research using shell photographs to identify individual southern rock lobsters and trace their origins. Consumer dinner-scanning and wider fishery use remained future aims. This is fresh reporting on an existing project, not a new product launch. Our restaurant, biographies and opt-out charge are invented.
Original report reopened; university project description corroborates identification research. No restaurant biography or paid opt-out established.
What we’re calling next
A restaurant using AI-based individual seafood identification charges diners a separate fee to suppress personalised animal biographies while retaining basic origin information.