There was a conveyer belt sushi resturaunt around the corner from my apartment. I love sushi. My first time there, here comes this lost looking Gaijin (Foreigner) wandering in. An old lady gestured to me and had me sit beside her. She explained to me how everything works.

There is a chef standing in the middle of a big conveyer belt. The plates are color coded by price. If you see something you want, just grab it. Then she showed me the menu. I am fortunate so many items had pictures. If they didn't have what you wanted, you write it down on a slip of paper. You give it to the chef and he will make fresh it for you. There was complimentary green tea and she showed me how that worked too.

The top tier plates were checkerboard black and gold. The cheapest were plain white with a yellow border. That'd be my beloved maguro. My favorite though is chuu toro, medium fatty tuna. Red boader plate. The old lady was a high roller, she had a huge stack of the top tier plates. You would just stack your empty plates and when you were done, the cashier would tally up your plates.

She apologized that she couldn't speak English. It simply wasn't taught in school in her day. I told her that's okay. Is my Japanese good enough? And she agreed.

It was the freshest, most affordable and most delicious sushi I've ever had. And yeah I'm an American, maybe I'm biased. Maybe I'm easily imopressed. Sure, whatever. But. I will tell you this. That sushi was so fresh sometimes the rice was still warm.