New York’s hottest new restaurant trend is not having to talk to anyone ever

It's a good time to be an introvert—New York restaurants are curbing human interaction through automated kiosks, solo dining booths and serve-yourself cubbies. 

At the Bushwick outpost of Japanese ramen chain Ichiran, diners can choose between a table in the traditional dining room or a seat at one of the restaurant's "flavor concentration booths," walled-in solo cubicles that guests can seat themselves at via an LED seating chart that lights up green when a booth is available. Order the bowl of your choice through a written form, which is snatched by a faceless server from behind a bamboo partition in front of you; ditto with payment. You can experience the whole shebang with nary a word spoken. 

A branching off of the fast-casual grab-and-go trend, quinoa automat Eatsa also removes waiters from the equation: Instead, patrons can order and customize their quinoa bowls through a smartphone app or the wall of iPads near the entrance. The bowls are doled out from an adjacent bank of food "cubbies" with an LCD screen box that displays the diner’s name. It's a similar set-up to Kellogg's Times Square cereal café, where diners can pick up their tricked-out cereal bowls in numbered "kitchen cabinets."