Midtown Lunch

I was promised there would be robots.  Sushi making robots.  It’s pretty much the only thing that would draw me to Beverly Hills for sushi, arguably the worst place in the city if you’re on the hunt for a raw fish bargain. But money is not an issue when robots are involved, and clearly my cheesy robot movies of the 80s filled brain needed to see this maki making machine in action.  I mean, are we talking a set of John Lithgow powered robotic arms handling raw fish in a sealed glass case like it was plutonium, Manhattan Project Style.  Or was this going to be some kind of love-able Johnny Number 5 type machine, making corny jokes as he rolls my spicy tuna roll. (I do seem to remember him mentioning sushi in one of my favorite lines of the movie.  Salmon to be precise.)

Sadly the “robot” looked more like a woodchipper than the Terminator, a headless, armless, legless Wall-E of sorts, minus the personality of course. In fact, the robot portion of the show consists of a metal box that spreads rice onto a pice of seaweed before your roll gets assembled by an organic, sentient being.  There’s a second, smaller box at the end of the assembly line that cuts your roll if you want it cut.  But calling that a robot would be like calling a hard boiled egg slicer a computer.  I quickly came to the realization that the talk of robots was just PR overindulgence meant to sucker people like me into visiting U-Sushi in Beverly Hills, and it worked.  Surprisingly, though, even without any A.I. I still managed to piece together a pretty fun and delicious lunch.

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