Shinkansen sushi

We went to the BEST sushi place tonight.
I assume most readers are familiar the conveyor-belt sushi restaurant, but for those who aren’t, it’s basically a fast-food sushi restaurant whereby the sushi chef stands in the middle of the shop surrounded by a little conveyor belt carrying small plates of sushi. He’s continually making new plates of sushi with different toppings and adding them to the conveyor belt. The customers sit on a long counter around the outside and as the trays file past they pick off whatever they like the look of. Like this:

If what you want isn’t there, you just yell out “tuna!” or “eel!” and the chef whips it up straight away. At the end of your meal, they add up how many plates you’ve eaten and work out the total. There are usually three different plate colours, according to the cost of the ingredients.

So that’s conveyor-belt sushi (or kaiten zushi to give it the formal name). But  the place we went to tonight takes kaiten zushi to a whole new level. It’s a huge sushi barn with seating for a couple of hundred people, and instead of the sushi chefs standing in the middle, they’re all out the back. Instead of calling out to the sushi chef, you type your order into a nifty little touch screen at your table. Like this:

Then within a couple of minutes, your sushi whizzes out to you on — wait for it — a special little Shinkansen (bullet train) that stops at your table with your freshly prepared order. The Shinkansen has its own little track and everything.

What a fantastic restaurant! This is us the end of the night:

Don’t mind Ruby’s expression; she’d had one or two too many plates and was starting to feel a little queasy. You see, at this place they not only have sushi going around on the conveyor belt, but also fizzy drinks and cakes and puddings and fried chicken and all manner of things which are highly tempting as they sail past right in front of your eyeballs. And we all know where that can end up. At least Ruby does now, anyway.

And to finish with, here’s Felix modelling the “hamburger sushi” — that’s right, two tiny little hamburger patties on top of the rice balls. Gotta love innovation.