Spoilers might be present from this point on

Ok, so we have some robots who decide to open a restaurant where they make biang biang noodles.

If that’s not enough to make you want to read the book, I don’t know how else to convince you. 😅 The premise is absurd enough (or, well, in 2026 it kind of isn’t anymore) that I didn’t need any more details.

Still, in more detail, it’s about a group of abandoned robots who used to work in a fast-food place. One of them, Staybehind, powers back on and realizes that the restaurant where they worked has been shut down, and that they themselves have been turned off.

After they are all rebooted and manage to connect to the network, they realize that they still have installments to pay (yes, shocking, who would have thought they’d have those problems too) in order to finish their contract and get out from under the company’s ownership. Basically, they have to keep making their payments or they will be permanently shut down and put into storage for an indefinite period.

Having nothing to lose, they contact the contract for the place where they used to work (which is funny, because the contract is an entity that lives on the blockchain and, out of fear of being canceled, lets them make changes), so the little restaurant they used to work in gets a new name and they can start over without being associated with the old fast-food place.

And that’s how Authentic Noodles is born, not ironically at all.

Hands, the head chef, decides with a great deal of passion and stubbornness that he wants to make biang biang noodles, and for him there is absolutely no other option. And they end up making the best noodles in the whole kingdom—or at least in whatever piece of San Francisco was left there—except that at this point no one knows that the place is being run by robots. Until, out of nowhere, they start getting flooded with negative ratings.

Someone finds out that Authentic Noodles is more like Automatic Noodles and, out of hatred toward them, tries to get them kicked off the food delivery platform through bad reviews. Robophobia?

But this book has a happy ending.

The robots decide to make a not exactly intuitive move and open the place to the public so people can actually come inside. People do come, enjoy the food and the look of the freshly decorated restaurant, socialize, and somehow are delighted to discover a group of robots who want to cook in order to experience the satisfaction of a job well done.

It is a very cozy and pleasant book.

But it also touches on some serious subjects:

• PTSD and trauma in general. Staybehind, as a former military robot who lost some members of his team, refuses to delete the recording of that day from his RAM and move it into permanent memory because he is afraid of losing his identity. Making that memory less important would change what defines him, who he is, and he does not know how he would be able to move forward afterward. Even so, because the memory is always available and so easy to access, it often pushes him into a state where he can no longer function. A feeling and condition so common among humans is placed into a new kind of scenario.
• Acceptance and equal rights. Their desire to be who they are, to be able to do something without having to justify themselves. The book suggests that these HEII robots (Human Equivalent Embodied Intelligence) come to be recognized as citizens, but at the same time they are not treated the same as human citizens.

Sweetie, the robot whose appearance is the closest to a human’s, decides not to repair a torn patch of skin that exposes a small part of her robotic skeleton, but instead to mark that spot with LEDs that highlight her nature even more strongly.

Two funny quotes:

Surely, one day, they would get in on the ground floor of a coin that blew up. They would sell fast, get rich, and finally invest in something real.

Good to know they dream about the same thing too.

He was especially keen on the old TV series Friends, which he insisted was the first show written entirely by LLM.

😅 Honestly, hard to argue with that.