Kaiten Sushi 回転寿司
When in Kyōto with a New York native it is imperative to experience the whole of what the old capital has to offer in terms of anything, but especially where cuisine is concerned. After living it up in the lush Ganko sushi, it’s hard to slum it anywhere else. Even so, when the idea of sushi is on the tip of your tongue and money’s an issue, kaiten sushi is the only way to go. Hence Kappa Sushi (かっぱすし), the two-story conveyor belt sushi restaurant on the corner of Sanjo and Kawaramachi-dori.
Yoshiaki Shiraishi “invented” kaiten sushi by opening the first of two hundred or so eventual Mawaru Genroku Sushi franchises in Osaka in 1958. He apparently got the idea from watching beer bottles circulate on conveyor belts in an Asahi Beer factory. How Laverne & Shirley. And though this idea didn’t truly take off until the economic bubble burst in the 90′s (when cheap restaurants became the norm for families and sad sad salarymen), Shiraishi-san was truly a food industry visionary, along the lines of what Henry Ford did for the automobile and Akio Morita did for the personal music device (aka the Walkman): which was to make something previously available to only the privileged few, widely and cheaply dispersed to the masses.
Kaiten sushi is not “fast food” per se, in that, although it is literally moving (about 8 cm a second), it can actually be quite healthy, depending on what you pluck from the conveyor belt onto the countertop before you. The majority of the servings are nigiri style(see photo), each plate laden with two cuts (unless it’s really good quality and then only one would come per plate) of most any kind of fish normally served as sushi. The popular plates are, of course, salmon (sometimes with mayo and thinly sliced onion), maguro (tuna), aji (Spanish mackeral), hamachi (Yellowfin), iwashi (sardines), unagi (river eel), ebi (shrimp, occasionally ama-ebi or sweet shrimp), ika (squid), tako (octopus), uni (sea urchin roe) and tamago (sake, soy-based egg), among others, though don’t be surprised when you see karaage (fried chicken), furaido potato (french fries), or some strange mixture of corn and mayo wrapped in seaweed trickle past. The few makizushi (rolls) that appear generally come in four small pieces, like kappa (cucumber), tekka (tuna) and negitoro-maki (minced fatty tuna & scallion roll). The prices vary with each multi-colored, variously designed plate, generally beginning from ￥100 and going up to ￥400-500 per plate. Finish your meal, count your plates, there’s your bill. Figuring most people average anywhere from five to 15 servings with ￥100 plates making up about 50%, you can see how lucrative the kaiten sushi game can be, especially when you factor in the low overhead where servers are concerned. Sure, you’ve got more chefs and your chefs are busy, constantly moving in fact, but it’s merely a muscle memorization game at this point with automation and humans interacting at a high, efficient level.
Possibly one of the best aspects about kaiten sushi is the intercom, where you communicate directly with one the probable 20 odd chefs working on a busy Saturday night. Push the big red button, wait for him to respond and place your order. True, hundreds of relatively fresh platters of sushi are cycling before your very eyes, but why not custom order your very own from the chef himself and, oh yeah, grab a couple of draught beers while you’re at it? I generally order about half of my prospective fish directly from the kitchen, 75% if it’s a slow afternoon service. No customers means that salmon passing you right now has probably been around the block more than you have. The busier the place, the better and fresher its sushi generally is. The better, fresher its sushi is, the busier it becomes. Since the quality of most products in Japan is extremely similar, the point of whether or not a business will succeed or fail relies largely on A) Service and B) Location. The product is going to be average to pretty good quality where ever you go, but the difference is convenience of approach (is your kaiten sushi in a crowded underground shopping center or down a rarely-traveled alley? Do I have to drive or can I take the subway?) and, the never-to-be-too-easily-dismissed-in-a-large-single-male-market: how pretty are your servers. To drive the point home, I myself have never eaten at a Yoshinoya franchise (not in Japan anyway), though I regularly go two blocks out of my way to slowly jaunt past the onetime Beef Bowl Purveyor (Pork’s big now with the continued ban on US beef & Bird Flu on the rise) on the corner of Oyafuko-dori to see which of the waitresses are in today. Because THEY. ARE. ALL. HOT. And I don’t even like beef (not entirely true but…), so imagine if I was more of a meat eater…
So, if you’re in Kyōto and don’t want a typically touristy Kyōto experience, Kappa Kaiten sushiya-san is definitely a great place to go for mid-afternoon beers and a few plates of some pretty damn good sushi. Keep your expectations low and order the kappa-maki and the aburi-salmon. Trust me…you’ll love it.
