At the beginning of last summer, a founding team of two restaurateurs and a technologist opened up Tigawok, one of the hottest new Asian QSR concepts in West Los Angeles’ Sawtelle district. The goal is to provide fast, affordable, and high quality ‘mini’ Chinese bowls produced by automated woks– think: orange chicken, spicy beef, mapo tofu. Since then lines have been forming onto the sidewalk during peak lunch and dinner hours, leading to a capital raise from a consumer VC to fund its expansion. In tandem, co-founder Giggs Huang has been ‘dogfooding’ his Next Robot automated wok startup at Tigawok as well as at ~40 grocery stores, restaurants, schools, senior living centers, and hospitals across the country. This week, HNGRY caught up with Huang to talk about how automation is fueling a new customer experience that ultimately unlocks better unit economics for restaurants and the future of the AI, hardware, and software that powers it.