It may never become a Harvard Business School case study, but you have to hand it to Flip camera creator Jonathan Kaplan for landing on his feet.

Out of the frying pan that was Cisco’s sudden decision to just stop making the innovative point-and-shoot video camera, Kaplan has decided to jump into the fire — at least into the hot kitchen of a small chain of limited-menu restaurants that make grilled cheese sandwiches.

The combination of the ultimate comfort food, location-aware smartphones and impulsive customers who are hungry now was enough for the entrepreneur to convince an investment group led by Sequoia Capital to put up enough to open about 20 stores at about $500,000 each, Kaplan told the All Things Digital conference Wednesday.

The idea isn’t entirely original (even if you don’t count the fax machine). Kaplan notes that the app from wildly successful restaurant chain Chipotle — which allows you to customize a burrito and then geolocate the nearest restaurant to pick it up — was a reason the likes of Sequoia was intrigued enough to invest. In fact, unlike the pre-ordering approach Chipotle utilizes, The Melt generates a QR code on its decidedly mobile-optimized website, which you scan in when you get to a location, thus actually placing the order in-store.

You still get your meal fast — within a minute, Kaplan told D9. The real innovation, he said, was the machine that makes the sandwich so quickly. And while it’s difficult to see how this might scale to more complicated food orders — let’s face it, making a grilled cheese isn’t rocket surgery — the sandwich is beloved and easy enough to prepare be an entire business plan based on instant gratification. Especially if nobody asks too many questions about why bringing a QR code into the store instead of just clicking on a web page in the store is a breakthrough.

As far as the fare is concerned, keeping it simple will be the secret to The Melt’s success, and they know it. So far the rest of the menu is soup and boxes of Crackerjacks.

The thought of using an app to eliminate the possibility of human error, especially to order fast food, seems brilliantly flawless. In real life, speaking from personal experience, it’s not a sure thing.

Of course, on stage at D9 everything worked perfectly: Walt Mossberg ordered the “Walt” and Kara Swisher the “Kara,” and, the D9 live blog reports, “about 30 seconds later, a waiter walks out on stage with the sandwiches and soup.”

Kaplan hasn’t been idle long. He sold Pure Digital, which made the Flip, and joined Cisco in 2009. He left the company only in February, two months before it announced it was killing the videocam.

So far there seem to be only two pop-up locations for The Melt, but three in San Francisco and one in Palo Alto, California, are already on the drawing board.