Serious Eats
Happy 50th Birthday, Sushi Conveyer Belt
1958 was a big year. A fourteen-year old Bobby Fischer won the U.S. Chess championships, NASA was created and the very first sushi conveyor belt scooted around a restaurant! It all started in April of 1958 when a mobile stream of plates carrying tuna belly fat and salmon first rotated inside Mawaru Genroku Sushi restaurant in Osaka, Japan. Creator Yoshiaki Shiraishi called it "kuru kuru sushi," which adorably translates to "sushi-go-around" in Japanese, and eventually decided that 8 centimeters per second was the ideal speed—slow enough for safe arrivals, but also fast enough to keep up with voracious appetites.
Shiraishi also invented a robotic sushi model, where robots carry the raw fish, but it didn't "go around" with customers as well. He was clearly not a big fan of human waiters. [via YeinJee]
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