The automated Japanese restaurant without waiters 17 October 2013 Last updated at 08:38 BST Spencer Kelly takes a break from the Ceatec technology fair in Tokyo to have some lunch in a Japanese restaurant with a difference.The latest technology ensures food can be cooked to order and delivered to you by conveyor belt with your bill being calculated as you dispose of your used plates down a chute to be washed.Keep up to date with all the latest gadgets and tech news via BBC Click's website and if you are in the UK you can see the whole programme on BBC iPlayer. Related Most watched Top stories Most watched Top stories World UK Business Politics Health Science & Environment Technology Entertainment On your connected tvHome / Travel Diaries / Kyoto, Japan – Imperial Palace, Philosopher’s Walk, Ginkakuji Temple: Around The World Kyoto, Japan – Imperial Palace, Philosopher’s Walk, Ginkakuji Temple: Around The World Everybody Hates A Tourist© 2017. More in California, Caribbean, Cruises, Jamaica, Los Angeles, Mexico, Mexico City, Napa Valley, St. Lucia, Travel ContestsTravel Contests: December 28, 2016 – Hong Kong, England, Fiji & moreTravel Contests: December 21, 2016 – Copenhagen, France, New York & moreTravel Contests: December 14, 2016 – Chile, Peru, Colorado, & moreClose

Lonely Planet Travel News Hong Kong restaurant delivers sushi direct to your table – by model railway! A new restaurant in Hong Kong  has taken the concept of conveyor belt sushi to new lengths using model railways. At Genki Sushi’s new Tsuen Wan Plaza outlet, diners can order their food on menu tablets at their tables without the aid of wait staff. sushi grade tuna publixSushi is then delivered to the table via a series of miniature railway sets modelled on Japan’s high-speed railway. sushi grade fish corpus christiThe restaurant features 24 railway tracks over three floors. sushi grade tuna annapolisFinally, the vibe of a big city has parked its techno-food savvy ass on Austin soil.where to buy sushi grade fish in temecula

Korea Garden on N. Lamar just remodeled and installed a sushi train. When my girlfriend and I walked in tonight we were surprised by the scene: the band Corto Maltese was just leaving as we arrived, tiny hipsters from UT filled a row at the conveyor belt, and, 75% of the patrons were gay. We ordered a hot pot of green tea and took our perch at the counter between a middle-aged, gay male couple on our left and an awesome, quirky student and her friends on our right.sushi grade fish east lansingKorea Garden has been around for a while and serves up Chronicle/Statesman lauded Korean food, but the sushi conveyer belt is a new addition. ichiban sushi menu ashevilleCalled a kaiten-zushi in Japan, the metal conveyor belt slickly delivered lots of nigiri sushi, When I lived in New York I frequented a sushi restaurant with a conveyor belt like this between Union Square and Gramercy Park (17th and Broadway?) and loved it.

Prices were based on the color of the plate, a format Korea Garden will be moving to after tomorrow. For now though, for its opening week, Korea Garden is running a special: all plates $1.50 each! Get it cheap while you can.Back to the bar around the conveyor belt, an awesome behavior was happening amongst the patrons. In true Austin fashion, as soon as diners sat down they became part of a collective conversation. You can't put Austinites in the same goddamn space as each other and facing each other without a ton of friendly banter. The sushi train I went to in New York was more like a bar; you faced the sushi chef/server. At Korea Garden, you face other patrons. And, inevitably conversations strike up over the sushi and over who wants what as the plates slowly make their way down the line.There's already a Missed Connection about the sushi train! I think it's arrived. And, I think Austin has arrived in some small way. Hear me out on this one: Clearly the young'uns, gaymos and artists have been waiting for this;

a new city trinket that facilitates the same gentle friendly Austin has possessed all along.*Post commissioned by Nicola Twilley (edible geography /foodprintproject / GOOD Magazine) as part of FOOD FOR THINKERS – An online festival on Food and Writing (18-23/01/2011) Courses are served on a table. Dishes are set on a rigorous manner. But does the subsequent experience of eating leave place for interaction among the companions? Each culture places cutlery in such a way that the subsequent freedom of movement is already predetermined. It is mostly remarkable between Western and Asian cultures; if the former pleads for a hierarchical untouchable order, the latter prefers a higher degree of spontaneity and unplannedness. The fact of using generic chopsticks instead of specific tools for each meal is directly translated into how guests relate themselves to space through their eating choreography. One dish surrounded by dozens of additional cutlery pieces Vs. dozens of dishes surrounding a pair of chopsticks.

In Korea, a meal consists of dozens of atomised courses scattered all along the table, letting each guest choose the actual order, rhythm and combinations of the meal. Sweet, cold, calm, sour, Kimchi, warm, roasting, Kimchi, cold, chilling, faster, tea, sweet… Every item – and every rest – plays the main character on stage. In the same line, Chinese table setting introduces a new component. Courses are decomposed in fewer dishes and are laid on a revolving surface, which guests decide when – and how fast – to turn around to pick the desired piece for their following bite. A constant negotiation with your sitting neighbours. Far beyond, Japanese sushi conveyor belts impersonate the paradigm of this choreography of freedom, where courses are on a constant move. Same food, countless different meals. On the other hand, Western culture inherited Bourbon and Versailles customs, and still needs to deal with this burden. Having only evolved to a slight simplicity of their past lavish versions, banquets nowadays still consist of appetizer, main course, second course and dessert.

And don’t even dare to alter the order, for God’s sake! Once every course is placed on the table, food is served among guests. Always following the cutlery and glass hierarchy. Once a course is finished, dirty plates, forks, knives and spoons need to be replaced by clean ones. And next course, of course. Clean cup, Clean cup, move down! There have been some reactions against established codes of dining orders (leaving snobbish experimental cuisine restaurants aside). In the 1930s, Marinetti already proposed a Manifesto of Futurist Cooking, where “the perfect meal demands:  general harmony among setting (glassware, dishes, decoration), flavours and colours of the food, […] the abolition of knife and fork, […] the rapid presentation, between courses, under the eyes and nostrils of the guests, of some dishes they will eat and others they will not, to increase their curiosity, surprise and imagination.” If the rules are to be broken, why not creating a colourful week diet and table setting out of one Paul Auster’s character?

Mixing reality with fiction, and back to reality reinventing fiction, Narrative Artist Sophie Calle ventured into The chromatic diet in 1997. [In SORIANO, F.: Fisuras Magazine N.9. 2001] But if dishes are to follow a strict composition of order, then Junya Ishigami’s  Table, makes dishes stay still at their most accurate coordinates in the immensity of the eating surface. Only four legs support a magic span, with a scarce 3 mm thick, almost flying, panel. The objects layout must remain untouched, static to death, so that the structure of the table stays in the most pure horizontal. Radical poetic experiences can teach us that a general demand for a more relational space seems to be needed at our obsolete everyday eating site. This space should rather be exclusively composed of relations between viewers and objects, participants and events. Like in Martí Guixé’s Mealing, a meal-in-motion prompting guests to interact. If not, this space is not even invisible; it almost does not exist.