'I went to the all-you-can-eat with robot waiters and I just wanted it to stop'

When the robots eventually come for us, and they certainly will, they might not look like the fearsome exoskeletal, shiny-chrome killing machines from the Terminator films. They might be more like the robot waiting staff at Sakura, the Japanese all-you-can-eat restaurant on Cheetham Hill Road.

They seem fine when you arrive. Playful even. “Here I am!” they announce chirpily, when they turn up with dishes at your table, their cute, animated faces and painted on duds intended to make them fun and non-threatening, which they are. To start with.

It was a greeting which, during my brief time there this week, I soon began to dread. For some context, last week Observer food critic Jay Rayner arrived in town and nearly came to eat here by accident.

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There’s another place called Sakura in Salford (‘delightful’, Rayner has called it), but in relaying how he nearly went to the wrong Sakura, he dropped some details about ‘a Japanese all-you-can-eat place in Cheetham Hill, offering a range of nigiri, maki, teppanyaki and the like at about £30 a head, ordered via a tablet’ with ‘robot-assisted service’, and I thought ‘hang on, chief, you’ve missed a trick here, that sounds brilliant’.

It turns out he had not, and now here I am wishing I was at the delightful Sakura instead. To get the pleasantries out of the way, the (real) people who work here are lovely and helpful and pleasant. The food, by contrast, was grave.

Unless you’re a contestant on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, you should never dread the