This is another way they will work around it.. Between robotic AI and outsourcing...

At Sansan Chicken in Long Island City, Queens, the cashier beamed a wide smile and recommended the fried chicken sandwich.

Or maybe she suggested the tonkatsu — it was hard to tell, because the internet connection from her 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 halfway across the world.

The 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 rife for abuse: The 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 onto flat-screen monitors via Zoom, are summoned when an often unwitting customer approaches. Despite a 12-hour time difference with the New York lunch crowd, they offer warm greetings, explain the menu and beckon guests inside.

But skeptical customers said they were not eager to join this particular Zoom meeting.

“You hear ‘hello’ and you say, ‘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 set up in the foyer with a surveillance camera trained on guests. “I never engage,” she said.

The service is the brainchild of Chi Zhang, 34, the founder of Happy Cashier, a virtual-assistant company that was thrust into the spotlight last week, when a social media post about the overseas workers went viral.

When the virtual assistants are not helping customers, they take food delivery orders, answer phone calls and oversee the restaurants’ online review pages, Mr. Zhang said.

The workers are employees of Happy Cashier, not the restaurants. And Mr. Zhang said that their $3-an-hour wage was roughly double what similar roles paid in the Philippines.

Tipping policy is set by the restaurants, he said, with one giving its virtual greeters 30 percent of the pooled total each day.

The restaurant industry has long been an entry point for immigrants, and a hotbed for labor violations like wage theft.

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

Mr. Zhang said he expected to quickly scale up by placing virtual assistants in more than 100 restaurants in the state by the end of the year.