Before Creator, I have never dined at a restaurant that was so devoted to not scaring me.

The first thing you see when you walk into Creator, the San Francisco robot burger restaurant, is a human, ready to take your order and submit it to the machine for processing. When I went there for the first time, I was struck by how much thought was put into the design of the restaurant: the sheer amount of work invested in distancing the experience from apocalyptic visions of robot takeovers and human obsolescence.

As labor automation becomes a larger component of manufacturing and even human services, we humans can’t agree on whether or not that’s ultimately a good thing for us. There’s something initially terrifying about the idea of having your job roboticized, like we’d go from zero to “The Matrix” in a second if we let our guard slip. Still, Creator’s robot-made burgers ($6) are satisfying and affordable enough that I’d keep going back for lunch, even if it does eventually turn out that the bot in the kitchen has been planning revolution this whole time.

Creator’s creators seem to have anticipated our (racist? speciesist?) mistrust of robot cooks and, to allay our fears, made everything as transparent as possible: The robot’s inner workings are on full display behind a window, like the veterinarian-school technique of surgically inserting a porthole into the side of a cow to expose its guts. As you wait, you can watch as the rose gold- and blond wood-trimmed machine slices, dices and grinds your burger before finally smashing it down and grilling it in a closed-off chamber. There are no wires, mechanical arms, lasers or heavy hydraulic noise: just bright and pretty components being assembled and pushed forward on a rose-gold conveyor belt that flips forward like pages in a book.

You can even inspect the beef if you want: It’s chunked up in bags and plastic containers in the shop’s see-through refrigerator, along with the other raw ingredients, sorted into clear, swappable containers like pneumatic tubes.

So how’s the burger, which is absolutely not made of nanobots disguised as beef molecules? The ¼-pound patty is ground to order, from pasture-raised brisket and chuck sourced from Country Natural Beef and Creekstone Farms. It’s a smart, beefy and just-fatty-enough blend that retains moisture and tenderness when cooked, which is notable for the fact that, for all their customizability, the burgers — cooked just short of full-on smashburger style — clock in at a toasty well-done every time. This fact might turn off folks who expect that a machine like this could achieve the ideal burger temp down to the degree, but I honestly didn’t miss it, especially not with that price point.

Creator offers five burgers with different toppings, with some coming out of collaborations with local chefs like Tu David Phu, Arun Gupta and Nick Balla. On my first visit, I had Phu’s Tumami Burger, dressed with smoked oyster aioli, shiitake mushroom sauce, bread-and-butter pickles by McVicker Pickles and thin-sliced onion. The combination of mostly brown ingredients with little vegetable matter to brighten them up didn’t look like much, but I was impressed by how the components combined to mimic the acidic savoriness that we expect from Taiwanese pork belly buns. The onion, sliced by a precise robotic knife, avoided my usual gripe with burger onions, which can be cut as unevenly as a boa constrictor that’s swallowed an elephant. I also enjoyed the Recreator, a smoked cheddar cheeseburger that carried subtle heat from habanero and smoked sea salt. Each of them, carry-out or no, comes in a leaf-shaped compostable container.

The sides (all $3) are made behind the scenes by humans, and options there include french fries, side salads featuring locally grown greens, and fried vegetables—all vegetarian. The fries are competent and well-seasoned, but the fried okra, which is off-menu, has a very pleasing slime-to-crunch ratio.

A human worker will also periodically come out from the back and replace the burger machine’s mise en place with tubes of fresh ingredients. I have to admit that seeing a cheese tube get jammed up feels little bit like, “Victory for humans!”

“I could see this being an attraction at Tomorrowland,” a co-worker mused on one visit.

“Naw,” another cut in. “This isn’t expensive enough for Disney World.”

Still, there are some quirks here. While I expected to order food directly from a tablet—since, you know, this is the future and all—I actually had to order at the door by talking to a middleman holding a tablet. The inefficiency of that system seemed out of place to me in a restaurant that was supposed to be all about the glories of machinery: The first time I went, the pace of ordering caused a bottleneck that increased the wait time. I realized that this dose of inefficiency had the effect of making the restaurant more approachable, more human even. Similar to the “add an egg” instruction in Betty Crocker’s cake mixes, that little bit of inconvenience makes us feel like we humans remain an important part of this process, rather than just passive things to be fed.

Aspects of the decor also made me think about what it means to signify humanness. When I sat at one of the long, low communal tables, I saw that each of them had huge, pizza-size holes cut out of them, filled with whole spices like star anise and peppercorns and covered with a glass window. Transparency again. It reminded me of a similar design element I saw at Dragon Beaux, which has a display of spices, dried legumes and grains in its lobby. But here, you can contemplate the beauty of whole spices while eating your robot-made lunch.

The bookshelf that stretches across the wall behind the drink machines featured selections that were just too poetic: a food-safety management manual; “The Art of Simple Food” by Alice Waters; a textbook titled “Mechanical Engineering Design”; “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by Robert M. Pirsig; and “Existentialism Is a Humanism” by Jean-Paul Sartre. Though the books are available for guests and workers to peruse, I rarely saw anyone interacting with them. I get it: Sartre is challenging to just pick up and read randomly.

As symbols of what the restaurant’s founders stand for, the books do express that sense of concern for automation that enhances humanity rather than replaces it. Pirsig’s book, for instance, speaks to a philosophy that marries scientific and rational ways of thinking with creativity and pleasure. The book on existentialism, generally considered to be a theoretical starting line for the broader movement, is all about individuals finding liberation through taking responsibility for their own actions.

I was surprised not to find anything by science fiction author Isaac Asimov, who coined the term “Frankenstein complex” to denote the human suspicion of robots. Referencing one of the most famously flawed creators, the complex stretches from human-like androids to self-driving cars, feared for their potential to replace us. Asimov wrote stories about roboticists struggling to overcome the public’s fear of their work, flipping the usual narrative of humankind attempting to create life and being burned for their hubris. Creator taps into these same themes: through its airy interior, the very unhumanoid appearance of the robot, and the literally life-giving properties of the food it produces.

It’s fitting that Creator is stepping into the bigger conversations we’ve been having in the Bay Area about the role of automation in human life. From Applebee’s questionable quesadilla burger to the hyped Le Grande burger at Wayfare Tavern to the growing legion of bleeding meat-free imitations, the burger has become an empty space into which we can pour all of our aspirations, preferences and anxieties. We can start so many conversations about the future, wealth, cultural mixing, mechanical reproduction, Russian sanctions and whatever else with a burger. That makes the humble dish a perfect product for Creator, a restaurant on a mission to demonstrate better living through technology. In American culture, the burger is like an introductory handshake: Even corporate chat bots know to start with “Hello.”

More Information Creator 680 Folsom St., San Francisco http://creator.rest Hours: 11:30 a.m-2 p.m. Wednesday-Friday Meal for two, sans drinks: $12-$18 What to order: Recreator, side salad, off-menu fried okra Plant-based options: Just sides. No plans to include veggie entrees for now. Drinks: Beer and sodas. Accessibility: Gender-neutral restrooms behind heavy doors. Wheelchair-specific table available, though it can be difficult to grab your order when the waiting area is crowded. Narrow offset entrance level to the sidewalk on the Folsom Street side. Noise level: Moderate. Offset by wall materials that absorb sound. Transportation: Two parking garages within a block. Difficult street parking. Close to 8, 12, 30, 45 and 91 Muni lines. Best practices: No reservations. The line gets long during peak lunchtime (12:30 p.m.) so aim for before or after. Be willing to squeeze into available slots at the communal tables if you have a large party.