[ti:More US Restaurants Remove Dining Areas] [by:www.51voa.com] [00:00.00]更多听力请访问51VOA.COM [00:01.04]Dining rooms are disappearing from restaurants in the United States, [00:06.35]as Americans increasingly use apps to order food. [00:11.45]One example is the new Chopt Creative Salad Company restaurant, [00:17.89]which opened last week in New York City. [00:22.10]It is unlike any of the company's other 61 restaurants. [00:27.50]It has no cash registers or dining tables. [00:32.18]Atlanta-based restaurant Chick-fil-A has similar locations in two cities: [00:39.64]Nashville, Tennessee and Louisville, Kentucky. [00:43.73]Customers order and prepay online. [00:47.88]They can either go to the store for their meal or have it sent to them. [00:53.29]Chick-fil-A is also trying something different. [00:56.84]The company has announced plans to set up three "delivery kitchens." [01:03.06]In all three, Chick-fil-A will share space with other restaurants to prepare food for delivery only. [01:11.68]Digital orders are a major growth area for fast-food and fast-casual restaurant chains. [01:21.14]More are turning to these dark, or ghost, kitchens to cut costs. [01:29.12]Wendy's, another fast-food business, announced last month [01:34.64]that it aimed to open two "dark kitchens" by the end of the year. [01:40.51]Some food delivery-only operations in New York and San Francisco have failed in recent years. [01:49.70]But in January, Travis Kalanick's CloudKitchens got a $400 million investment [01:58.32]from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, Reuters reported. [02:03.48]Kalanick is a co-founder of ride service Uber. [02:08.12]The Wall Street Journal first reported the investment earlier this month. [02:14.64]CloudKitchens, founded in 2016, [02:18.44]builds shared food preparation areas for delivery-only restaurants to rent. [02:25.12]Julie Atkinson is the Chief Marketing Officer for Chopt. [02:30.62]She says the company offered pick-up and delivery orders soon after it opened 18 years ago. [02:38.96]Today those orders make up nearly make up nearly half of its business at larger restaurants, she said. [02:46.10]"We are sensing a really huge customer need for speed, for convenience," she said. [02:53.17]"We're hopeful that this concept really raises the bar on customer convenience." [03:00.28]On November 5, coffee house Starbucks [03:03.94]opened its first Starbucks pickup store in the United States for online orders. [03:10.97]The new store is similar to some new Starbucks stores in China, [03:16.08]where digital ordering is more common. [03:20.08]I'm John Russell. 更多听力请访问51VOA.COM