Kura Revolving Sushi Bar in Philadelphia sends out its fish on a conveyor belt
The Japanese restaurant, part of a chain founded in 1977, also uses a robot to deliver drinks.
Tekka maki meets high tech at the buzzy, new Kura Revolving Sushi Bar, which opened last week at 1721 Chestnut St. in the Rittenhouse Square-area building that previously housed Aerie and American Eagle.
From the moment you walk in and put your name and number into a tablet to secure a table (keep in mind that the waits in the evenings have stretched past two hours), it’s a streamlined digital experience.
Covered plates of sushi drift by on a conveyor belt — a far faster-paced experience than you may remember from the long-ago Pod in West Philadelphia.
At Kura, where chefs work in an open kitchen in the back, you pay $3.55 per plate, counted electronically as you place the empties into a slot at the end of the table.
If you order ramen, udon, fries, dumplings, or another hot dish from the touch pad menu positioned over your table, the food will be zipped straight to the table on a second conveyor belt.
Human servers are around to help, and a robot with blinking eyes named Kur-B delivers drinks. (Incidentally, robots are making an appearance in dining rooms. The new Nan Xiang Xiao Long Bao, a dumpling restaurant in Cherry Hill, has a similar one.)
It might not be the omakase experience at Royal Izakaya, or a night out at Morimoto. There is an impressive selection of decent-enough sushi and sashimi — the generic “spicy popcorn shrimp roll” and “tuna roll” plus more ambitious offerings that I might not have expected from a chain. (This is the 43rd location for Kura, founded in Japan in 1977.)
Over the course of several minutes the other night, for example, the conveyored plates contained toro, albacore otoro, negitoro, sockeye salmon, aburi eel with miso cream cheese, hamachi tataki with ponzu oil, tuna yukhoe, Spanish mackerel, Hokkaido scallop, and inari.
A short anime plays on the tablet after every five sushi plates are dispensed into the plate slot. Prizes (badges, tattoos, and lanyards) are received after every 15 plates, through an arrangement with the game company Tetris.
Payment via screen was a snap; the tab for my 11-year-old and me was $55 for six sushi plates, two appetizers, a bowl of udon (served hot in a covered bowl via conveyor), and dessert.
For now, only tea and soft drinks are served. A bar is on the way.
The main quirk was the restroom situation — down the elevator to the basement and around several corners.
Kura Revolving Sushi Bar, 1721 Chestnut St. Hours: 11 a .m.-9:30 p.m. Sunday-Thursday, 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday and Saturday. No reservations, though those who join Kura’s rewards program may join the wait list remotely.