Four of us girls in the Kitazano dorm have a photography night class together. Last Wednesday after class we met up with our friends Jess and Rina at the Hakusan station – which is great because it was on the line we take to school and thus free to get to – and went to this restaurant called “Hamazushi.” It’s a conveyor belt sushi spot. The deal is, plates of sushi go by on a conveyer belt and you take what you want. They count the plates up at the end and charge accordingly. It’s a pretty good deal.Everything that goes by on the conveyor belt follows a sign with a picture that says what the item is. There are also signs that go by with pictures of beer or slices of cake – those things are things that you can order via touch screen and the signs are essentially going by to entice customers to order them.
Family style dinner delivered via conveyor belt? Japan knows what I like.
Katie was excited to try sushi with sea urchin in it. I was excited about my apple juice. Life was good for all.
Except Katie wasn’t the biggest fan of the urchin – but trying new things was exciting!
We came to realize that the plated food that rests on these bowls is the food that people ordered via the touch screen monitor. We realized this after indulging in some sort of exotic sushi plate, then ordering our own tempura, and then finding that the tempura was plated in this manner. Woops. A beeping sound also signals to alert your table when your order approaches, so that you don’t miss it. It’s brilliant.
Sometimes the food that goes by is intriguing, and you must try it, just to know. Just for the experience.
And sometimes it has a lot of purple tentacles and you think, “Maybe there’s a reason so many of these are going by. No one else grabbed them either.” And you think, “Maybe next time, mysterious tentacled sushi.”
Oyster tempura sushi is great! Putting the whole thing in your mouth at once is a mistake that I may have made – the difficulty level for handling that with grace is 5 stars.
Mass consumption and the aftermath.
Rina helped us out by ordering our desserts for us. And then. Cake came out on the conveyor belt.
And everything was right with the world.
The check was 4,989 yen for a meal that fed six hungry Kitazono girls.
38 plates of sushi + 1 box of apple juice + 1 mystery item + 2 orders of macha ice cream and + 4 slices of cake
= 831.5 yen per person = 8.97 USD = best meal deal ever
