Is food better if you don’t have to talk to the people who bring it to you? Or, perhaps, not even the person you’re eating it with? This is the proposition of Inamo, a new restaurant in Soho, central London, whose owners have developed technology that grants you the power to eat your dinner in silence. We used to call that a marriage.

You order from the table, or rather using the table, thus saving the awkward and sometimes frustrating task of catching a busy waiter’s eye. You can also check your bill using the “smart” tabletop, order a taxi and find out where to go on to for a drink nearby.

As you enter Inamo – an Asian fusion joint that looks like Wagamama meets The Spy Who Loved Me (on a budget) – the first thing you notice is a sculpted white unit above each table setting. This houses a projector that beams information down onto the blank corian tabletop, which acts much like a white wall.

In the bottom right-hand corner, just below your chopsticks, is a sunken ring about the size of a tax disc. This is your mouse pad. Drag your finger around this circle and an arrow darts about the tabletop, turning it into a de facto computer screen. Scroll through menu choices, enjoy a preview of what your food may look like, then double-click to order and a Bluetooth signal is sent to the kitchen, where your dish is prepared and (after the appropriate waiting period) brought to your table. You can also request your bill or play battleships against your fellow diners, just by tapping away.

Inamo is the love child of two young Oxford graduates, Danny Potter and Noel Hunwick, who are today bouncing around the restaurant like a pair of overexcited labradors. You can barely hear the diners not talking to one another (too engrossed in their computerised tables) over the gleeful thumping of their tails.

Potter, 27, says he got the idea several years ago after a particularly rage-fuelled meal in which he became blood-boilingly fed up with trying to get a waiter’s attention. Rather than opting for the obvious solution (better waiters), he decided to bypass the human element as far as he possibly could.

A physics graduate, Potter was soon in geeky thrall to the possibilities of electro-ordering. Teaming up with his university friend Hunwick, 26, he set to work developing existing Bluetooth and projection technologies for the restaurant market.

The pair are a bit evasive about where the cash for this eye-wateringly expensive endeavour came from – which makes me wonder if the funding was less Dragons’ Den, more Dad’s Pocket. Either way, they worked tirelessly to iron out every kink and virus. As a result, Inamo boasts not only a pastry chef and mâitre d’, but an engineer too.

So what is the experience like? As I take my seat, my tabletop is set to a vivid aquamarine with a loose floral graphic that wouldn’t look out of place on a Habitat tea tray. Yuk. I move my mouse to the options bar to select something more soothing. I try pictures of bamboo, Chinese lanterns and grass. No, no, no. I give a photograph of the galaxy a go but am left feeling like I’m about to eat my dinner off a Star Wars bedspread. What’s wrong with a nice white tablecloth?

I click on the menu and begin to scroll through the food options. As I linger on sushi handrolls and cod with teri-yaki sauce, larger images of the food appear in preview form, placed on the table as if I am about to eat them. I don’t like a visual of the food I’m going to get as, for one thing, it spoils the surprise. For another, no matter how fancy the produce, it gives a nasty overtone of those picture menus you get outside cafes on the Costa del Sol.

I select beef in truffle oil, a duck and pomegranate salad and a bottle of water. While I wait for them to arrive I click around various menus and find I can watch a live feed to the kitchen where the food is being prepared. An open can of Coke sits in the foreground while a couple of blurry men in chef’s trousers hang out in the far corner.

The food arrives so I pack in the electronic jigsaw I was halfway through. It’s the wrong dish. The waiter apologises, and initiates precisely the sort of annoying chat one had hoped to avoid. “Are you sure you didn’t order this?”

“Yes,” I say. Really?” he questions, before making a big show of taking it away unconvinced.

I click on the bill to double-check and find that although I haven’t ordered what was brought, I do seem to have unwittingly requested some pork thingy. It turns out I accidentally stuck my elbow in the mouse pad. Anyway, after a bit of dilly-dallying, the right food arrives. As Inamo doesn’t officially launch until September 4, and this is a “soft opening” to get the place up and running smoothly, I won’t do a critique of the food, except to say that for the money (it’s £40 a head without breaking sweat) you can eat a lot better elsewhere.

There are some elements that really work. For example, when you check your bill, it gives you both the cost of the table’s order and your personal order side by side, which should stop all those “Who had rice?” debates that can really sour the end of an evening dining in a big group. That said, the waiter problem is far from eradicated. Mine wouldn’t shut up. And for all they are meant to fade into the background, there’s still a 10% service charge added to your bill.

As for the technology . . . well, it’s fun while it lasts. However, as my mouse clicked up and down the menus, I couldn’t quite place where I had seen this before. Then it hit me – it was just like the online takeaway service Deliverance, only Deliverance will bring it right to your door and you never have to speak to anyone at all.

Unless speed or thrift is at stake, crème brûlée and computer chips make poor bedfellows. In fact, when you’re paying top dollar for a meal out, a bit of human fuss is what’s required. Otherwise, why not stay at home?

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