A robot is making Philly’s best new grab-and-go sushi

Philadelphia’s seafood scene has surged in recent years, fed by the rise of omakase experiences, the Jersey Shore’s oyster revival, and roving retailers like Fishadelphia and Small World Seafood. Now, one fish shop is turning to a robot to help it offer better takeout sushi.

Grab-and-go sushi is the opposite of omakase: prepackaged, affordable, often of anonymous origin and dubious quality. Leave it to Bryan Szeliga, the studious purveyor of Fishtown Seafood, to turn that reputation around.

When Szeliga, a seafood-industry vet, opened Fishtown Seafood in a former corner deli in 2022, he introduced the neighborhood to super-frozen tuna, cold-cracked lobster, and $1 oyster happy hours (take ‘em home and shuck ’em yourself) as well as more obscure items like goldbanded jobfish and snook. Szeliga’s goal is to offer consumers transparently sourced, high-quality fish at the retail level. “We’re not buying adulterated seafood,” he says. “No sodium tripolyphosphate. No added moisture. No carbon monoxide.”

The tiny store has gained a following not only among home cooks looking for top-notch fish but also Fishtown-based chefs who stop in to do personal shopping.

Szeliga had already been considering an expansion in 2023 when a broker approached him about a 900-square-foot space at the corner of 22nd and Pine in Fitler Square. It would allow him to not only bring the gospel of eating more — and more sustainable — seafood to a new neighborhood, but also, at twice the space of the original Fishtown location, realize a long-held dream of offering ready-made sushi.

When Szeliga signed the lease, he started getting his ducks in a row. The fish he already had covered, thanks to his global network of suppliers. He also assembled a high-end lineup of soy sauces, rice vinegar, wasabi, and rice — including milled-to-order Japanese grains from the Rice Factory in New York — based on the suggestions of chefs who had shopped at the Belgrade Street location over the years.

Next, Szeliga needed to optimize production. Hand-rolled sushi requires time and skill (in Japan, sushi chefs train for years to master each step of the process). Szeliga didn’t have the budget, or platform, for a sushi chef, but he wanted to provide a consistent product in line with the quality of the ingredients inside.

Enter the Suzumo sushi robot, which dispenses neatly shaped rectangles of rice that, once filled with ingredients, are molded into compact cylinders. The robot is manufactured by a Japanese company that debuted its first sushi robot in 1981; its products have helped lead to the proliferation of Japan’s affordable, reputable convenience-store sushi.

“Suzy,” as Fishtown Seafood’s staff calls their robot, specializes in uramaki, or inside-out rolls, the rice-ringed pieces that you’ll commonly see on trays of grab-and-go sushi. (Suzy can also shape nori-wrapped rolls, while other Suzumo machines can shape rice for nigiri, onigiri, and tofu-wrapped inari.) She gives Fishtown Seafood’s staff the capacity to prep around 800 rolls a day.

“This will allow us to focus on putting our costs into the highest-quality ingredients available rather than putting our cost into labor,” Szeliga says.

Robots have been creeping into Philly‘s workforce for years. You‘ll find them patrolling Lowe’s parking lots, packing orders in Amazon warehouses, serving drinks in Center City, and bussing dirty dishes in Chinatown.

Compared to her wheeled and robotic-armed comrades, Suzy is almost static, sitting on a stainless-steel prep table in the back of the Fitler Square shop. Before work begins, cooked rice is loaded into a compartment at the top of the robot. At the touch of a button, Suzy prints out a sheet of rice, then patiently waits for a human to add a rectangle of nori, a strip of fish, and slices of avocado or cucumber. Once everything is in place, she envelops the nascent roll, folding and compressing it into an even cylinder.

While Suzy automates the rolling process, there‘s still a human element to making the sushi, says Charlie Knodel, Fishtown Seafood Fitler Square’s customer-experience director. Back-of-house manager Tony Robinson and staffers Kaszmir Parris and Jim Zink make the sushi rice, cut the fish (some of which arrives in already squared-off blocks) and other ingredients, and sprinkle the rolls with sesame seeds.

“There are going to be little imperfections that we have to, in the moment, fix ourselves, push things together, so there’s still an art to it,” Knodel says. “It takes a lot of hours of practice to get it down... The goal is to offer restaurant-quality product.”

The staff prepares the sushi in batches each morning before opening. All the rolls are chilled before they go under what staff call the “guillotine” — a sushi-roll slicer that cuts the roll into eight uniform rounds in a single stroke.

The various rolls, which are also sold in Fishtown, go for $12 or $14 per eight-piece package. There’s a handful of minimalistic rolls — including ones with Japanese yellowjack, farm-raised New Zealand king salmon, and longline-caught big eye tuna from Korea — as well as a few more complex entries, like the “Californ-I-a roll” with wild-caught Jonah crab from Maine and Jawndiments' Long Hot Pepper Mayo; a play on a Philadelphia roll featuring Daniel Boulud brand smoked salmon with Perrystead Dairy’s Real Philly Schmear; and a “Down East roll” with Maine lobster, Kewpie mayo, and Side Hustle Salt seasoning.

The rolls are available Monday through Friday, noon to 6:30 p.m. The Fitler Square location also recently debuted chirashi bowls with salmon, yellowtail, and big eye tuna. And while you‘re there, you can snag some fish for dinner, whether it‘s a salmon or branzino fillet, wild-caught shrimp, or Canadian scallops.

Fishtown Seafood has locations at 339 Belgrade St. and 2131 Pine St., with more locations on the way in Haddonfield (114 Kings Hwy. East) and Chestnut Hill (inside Market at the Fareway, at KP’s Fine Meats stall). Its hours at are Monday through Friday noon to 6:30, Saturdays and Sunday noon to 4 p.m.