26 Apr 2007 0831H

Conveyor-belt sushi in Chicagoland

Last weekend E, J, and I had the pleasure of driving around the northwest suburbs on a brilliant spring day in Chicagoland and we ate.

One of the highlights of the trip was the obligatory stop at Mitsuwa, nee Yaohan for okonomiyaki, takoyaki, baked goods, and ice cream, and we also had tasty, smooth Italian ices at Johnny’s Beef over by there but that’s for another time.

We had “kurukuruzushi” at Sushi Station, which is sushi conveyed to stationery diners via a conveyor belt, a form of dining called kaitenzushi. Kurukuru seems to be the onomatopoeia for the sound of the conveyor belt turning. Total came out to be about $16 a person.

One gets to pick the sushi that one likes from the belt, the plates are color-coded, and when you’re done the waitstaff counts them up and gives you the total. Kampai in Mt Prospect has done this for over a decade now, but this is some industrial shit.

I liked it! It wasn’t OMGWTFBBQ sushi but it was a great experience.

This is a fabulous idea. I hear even that in Japan they use RFID tags on the plates to signal when the sushi can be declared “dead” (been out on the belt too long) and should be removed from the belt and also the staff have detectors that they can sweep a column of stacked plates in order to get the total.

Being a Cantonese nationalist, I asked why isn’t there kaiten dim sum? Ah but there is, there is. In Odaiba, near Tokyo, there is apparently a “Little Hong Kong,” a mall within a mall that has a kaiten dim sum, or “yamucha” (Cantonese, yum cha (飲茶), a euphemism for having dim sum), which sounds fascinating. I’m also fascinated by the idea that in Japan they call buffets/all you can eat places, “viking” (バイキング) lunches, “viking” restaurants, but perhaps another time for that. Since I’m not very literate in Japanese, it seems to me that the lunch special, which goes from 11AM-4PM, is 1260 yen (~$11) and you have a time limit of 60 minutes, and the dinner is 2100 yen (~$18) with a limit of 90 minutes. (The menus are from the Yokohama Chinatown location.)

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