Another branch of the original in Fremont. It’s one of those places where everyone sits around a large kitchen area with plates of sushi and other dishes moving about on a conveyor belt. One grabs whatever one likes and pays at the end depending on the number of plates one has (they are color coded for five different prices… $1.50 – $4.00). If you get tired of waiting for something you want to appear (if they just don’t get around to replacing them or someone keeps evilly grabbing them before they get to you), you can ask for them to make it for you.

I love how once you get seated you can start eating instantaneously. They will take your drink orders once you sit.

They have a reasonable variety of sushi plus other things like salads, noodles, fruit, fried fish, tempura, desserts. This is a good place for those not familiar with sushi because you can see the actual pieces move by you, read exactly what they are and what they contain, and try out a smallish portion. Very tapas like. While they don’t have anything crazy, they have a good variety of things.

They had a lot of vegetarian options… big plus for nonfish eating people who get dragged along a sushi eating expedition.

While the sushi itself was hardly the best I have had, I think it a good value for the money. One can eat a lot of food relatively inexpensively. One can also do what my friend was doing and not eat any of the “blue” plates ($3.25 and $4.00 I think) as he wanted to eat more.

I was going to count how many plates they had moving about on the belt, but I forgot. It did take five minutes for the dishes to make a complete circuit around.

We were annoyed with their mysterious waitlist (they don’t take reservations). We had gotten there and were told that the wait was 20 minutes although there were many empty spots… the place must’ve been only half-full. Apparently, there were many parties ahead of us but they were “walking around”, and the front person told us to walk around as well. Odd that they would hold spaces for people who weren’t there (when we were). Maybe they told the others to come back in x number of minutes. We did end up walking around and came back quickly after 15 miutes, but then they were doing something funky and seating parties with the same amount of people or more who were after us on the list (we could see the list they were using) although they knew we were back. What was up with that? We weren’t being rude or annoying although we felt like it after a while. We did not get seated until over an hour after we had originally arrived; actually we were leaving to finally go somewhere else when they called us in.

OK, end rant. We mellowed out after eating though. However, the wait was still pretty freakin annoying.