At Sansan Chicken in Long Island City, Queens, the cashier smiled broadly and recommended the fried chicken sandwich.

Or maybe he suggested the tonkatsu; It was hard to tell, because the Internet connection from his home in the Philippines was spotty.

Romy, who declined to give her last name, is one of 12 virtual assistants greeting customers at a handful of restaurants in New York City, from the other side of the world.

Virtual hosts could be the vanguard of a rapidly changing restaurant industry, as small business owners seek relief from rising commercial rents and high inflation. Others see a model ripe for abuse: remote workers are paid $3 an hour, according to their management company, while the minimum wage in the city is $16.

The workers, all based in the Philippines and projected on flat-screen monitors via Zoom, are summoned when a customer, often involuntary, approaches. Despite a 12-hour time difference with the New York lunch crowd, they offer friendly greetings, explain the menu, and invite guests inside.

But skeptical customers said they weren’t eager to join this particular Zoom meeting.

“You hear ‘hello’ and you’re like, ‘What the hell is that?’” Shania Ortiz, 25, recalled of a recent trip to Sansan Ramen, a neighboring Japanese restaurant that had a gold-framed flat-screen monitor installed. in the lobby with a surveillance camera focused on the guests. “I never compromise,” she said.

The service is the brainchild of Chi Zhang, 34, founder of Happy Cashier, a virtual assistant company that rose to fame last week, when a post on social media about foreign workers went viral.

He was taken by surprise. The program has been quietly being tested since October, but the company’s website has not yet been created. The technology is now available in stores in Queens, Manhattan and Jersey City, New Jersey, including Sansan Ramen, its sister store, Sansan Chicken, and Yaso Kitchen, a Chinese dumpling soup shop. Two other Chinese restaurants that use the service on Long Island asked not to be identified, she said.

Mr. Zhang is the former owner of Yaso Tangbao, a Shanghainese restaurant in downtown Brooklyn that closed during the coronavirus pandemic. He said the experience reinforced the idea that restaurants were being squeezed by high rents and inflation, and that a virtual assistant model, something like that employed by overseas call centers, could help maximize small spaces. retailers and improve store efficiency.

When virtual assistants aren’t helping customers, they coordinate food delivery orders, take phone calls and monitor restaurants’ online review pages, Zhang said. They can take food orders, but cannot handle cash transactions.

The workers are employees of Happy Cashier, not the restaurants. And Zhang said his salary of $3 an hour was about double what similar positions were paid in the Philippines.

The tipping policy is set by restaurants, he said, and one of them gives its virtual assistants 30 percent of the common total each day.

The restaurant industry has long been an entry point for immigrants and a focus of labor violations such as wage theft.

But the Happy Cashier model is legal and minimum wage laws extend only to workers “who are physically present within the geographic boundaries of the state,” according to a spokesperson for the New York State Department of Labor.

Zhang said he hoped to grow quickly by placing virtual assistants in more than 100 restaurants in the state by the end of the year.

The prospect is alarming, said Teófilo Reyes, chief of staff at Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, a nonprofit labor group that has pushed for a higher minimum wage in New York.

“The fact that they have found a way to outsource work to another country is extremely worrying, because it is going to put dramatic downward pressure on wages in the industry,” he said.

The fast-food workforce is already shrinking and new technologies could further transform the industry, said Jonathan Bowles, executive director of the Center for an Urban Future, a public policy think tank.

Fast food restaurants in New York City had an average of 8.5 employees in 2022, he said, up from 9.23 in 2019, before the pandemic.

Virtual assistants have become common in customer service and corporate settings, but they are rare in the practical business of restaurants.

A recent exception came from Freshii, a Canadian restaurant brand that faced backlash in 2022 over allegations of outsourcing work, after partnering with a virtual cashier company called Percy.

Mr. Zhang said his business was different. “It is a service, we are providing a tool. It’s up to them how to use it,” he said of his restaurant’s customers.

Brett Goldstein, 33, founder of an artificial intelligence company who made the viral post about virtual workers, said some commentators had described the model as dystopian, while many others had been intrigued.

At Sansan Chicken in Manhattan’s East Village, Rosy Tang, 30, a manager, praised the service.

“This is a way for small businesses to survive,” he said, adding that the cost and space savings it provided could allow him to add a small coffee stand to the store.

In practice, however, the model’s peculiarities abound.

At Sansan Chicken in Queens, the virtual assistant couldn’t help a reporter order a sandwich without cheese on a touch menu. The assistant said the reporter should order in person from staff members at Sansan Ramen next door, which shares a kitchen with the chicken restaurant.

Will Jang, 30, an associate at Goldman Sachs, had lunch Wednesday at Yaso Kitchen in Jersey City and completely ignored his virtual host, Amber.

“I thought it was some advertisement,” like the pre-recorded videos in taxis, he said.

Amber, who did not give her last name, took it in stride. After studying business administration in college, she said she worked in person at a fast food restaurant. She started this virtual job three months ago.

“This is my first time working from home,” he said in front of a virtual background adorned with mustachioed cartoon meatballs.

When asked where her house was, she demurred.

“I’m sorry, I can’t share any more personal details with you,” he said. “Can I take your order?”

Nate Schweber contributed reports.