Sushi Restaurant Uses Sushi Robots and Control Centers to Cut Costs [Restaurant]

Kura, a sushi chain, specializes in efficiency and turning a profit. So much so they’ve eschewed traditional sushi chefs for sushi robots, a massive staff of waiters for conveyor belts and restaurant managers for a control center with video link.

When Kunihiko Tanaka opened his first Kura restaurant in 1995, he used conveyor belts to slash on labor costs. That idea wasn’t new, as conveyor belts had been used since the 1950′s. But as he grew more inquisitive about efficiency, he started placing managers in a sorta command center, as opposed to at each restaurant. This manner, a small group of managers could watch a video link of the restaurants and spot everything happening in all of the stores.

Now, Kura has moved to even more automation in their restaurant:

Diners use a bit panel to order soup and other side dishes, that are brought to tables on special express conveyor belts. Within the kitchen, a robot busily makes the rice morsels for a server to top with cuts of fish which have been shipped from a central processing plant, where workers are trained to slice tuna and mackerel accurately right down to the gram.

Diners are asked to slide finished plates into a tableside bay, where they’re automatically counted to calculate the bill, doused in cleaning fluid and flushed back to the kitchen on a stream of water.

All that efficiency adds up to affordable sushi and those that keep coming back, meaning huge profits even in lean times. [ NY Times ]

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This post is tagged: cleaning fluid, conveyor belts, restaurant diners, restaurant managers, sushi robots, traditional sushi