Conveyor Belt Sushi (はま寿司)

Recently, I took the kids to an indoor playground in an area of Yokohama called Honmoku. This was a rather uneventful trip, but as we were leaving I noticed on the second floor of the building there was a restaurant called はま寿司 - Hamazushi. Elsa and I had been to a conveyor belt sushi place on our house hunting trip, but that was just a conveyor and chairs and high-stress Japanese ordering. This place I stumbled upon was far more family friendly; with ordering screens at every table and a conveyor that wound around all the tables to reach everyone in the place.

Amazingly, when we were looking for somewhere to go for dinner on "Happy Friday" (a governmental push to get people to come home from work before 5 pm on the last Friday of every month), the kids got super excited when I said conveyor belt sushi. With them on board, the whole family hopped on the local bus for Honmoku and headed to Hamazushi.

Upon arriving, we saw a line to be seated. I was a bit worried but, like all good restaurants, a friendly bi-lingual robot was there to help put our name in the queue.

After entering your party size and whether want a table or bar seating, the robot prints a ticket with your party number and also a random number from 1 to 10 that corresponds to a piece of seafood. In our case, the number was 359 and our item was scallops.

This is a fraud prevention technique. When your number is called by the robot overlords, you have to correctly enter the 1-10 seafood item on your receipt in order to get your table assignment. If you are some random person who wants to pretend to be party 359 when its called, you have only a 10% chance of claiming the table. Admittedly, that's still a pretty high chance. But this is Japan so I doubt anybody ever tries to pull a stunt like this anyway.

Once we correctly entered our seafood item, we received our table assignment. We proceeded to table 66, which the kids thought was awesome because it was the last table and therefore the highest numbered table in the place. If you are at all familiar with our son Calvin, then you know this meant we basically had THE BEST TABLE EVER!!!

The booth we arrived at was awesome. There are napkins, forks, spoons, six different kinds of sauces, ginger, chopsticks, hot water for tea and, of course, a conveyor belt that runs along it. However, the truly awesome thing is that you don't need to interact with human beings! Social interactions are the worst and I strongly encourage people to do as few as possible. At the table, you can simply wait and let delicious sushi come to you. That approach doesn't guarantee that something will come that you want. To make that happen, you use the touchscreen ordering system. This is fairly self-explanatory and can be switched to English for easy ordering.

Ordering is simple, with multiple sections for various items. Drinks are the only part of the experience where you need to see a human. Unless of course, your entire party is drinking juice boxes, in which case the conveyor will deliver all of your juicy goodness on its own. Those of us beer and sake drinkers will have a human deliver our tasty libations, thank you very much.

With drinks in hand, it's obviously time to enjoy some sushi. We started off with the classics; salmon, tuna (Calvin's favorite), Tamago (Egg omelet - Miles's favorite), etc... and then worked our way to some other crazy stuff; basil octopus, caviar, geoduck. All of it was good. This isn't a top of the line sushi place, but its still high quality and super tasty. Plus, it's ridiculously fun to order and have stuff magically show up at your table.

You may be wondering, "How do you know if a piece of sushi is something you ordered or just something going around on the conveyor belt?" Great question! We wondered that ourselves for a bit as well. Turns out it's pretty simple. If a plate is in a blue bowl labeled ご注文品 (gochumonhin - ordered goods), that's for an order. When your ordered items get nearby, your screen will light up and inform you of the pending arrival, as demonstrated in the following video:

There are so many different things to try, from sushi to ramen to gyoza to even french fries, cakes, and fruit! The kids had a blast and have already asked if we can go back. We definitely will. We have also heard of other automated sushi places like this with unique cool technology; such as a sushi place that has you depositing the plates in a return and for every 5 plates deposited, you get a spin of a slot-like wheel that has a chance at prizes. YES PLEASE.

Perhaps the best feature of all of this was how cheap it was. When we completed scarfing our faces with deliciousness, I pushed the button to get the check (会計). This summoned a waiter who tallied up our plates and drinks and gave us the final total. When I glanced at the final number, I asked Elsa, "Take a guess how much we owe." "100 bucks," she replied. HA! I laughed in her face and said, "Simpleton, this meal was a mere $54 American dollars".

The kids, who just experienced probably their greatest night ever, were given an even bigger prize in Elsa letting them play a few games of air hockey. Calvin got destroyed and began crying when Miles told him that no, he hadn't lost, Miles had lost (he hadn't). Thus capped off a pretty awesome night of conveyor belt sushi and good dudes.