Hama Sushi: A Big Conveyor-Belt Sushi Meal

Conveyor-belt sushi has really been having a moment lately.

At the beginning of this year, places like Sushiro and Hama Sushi seemed to go from something I only occasionally saw online to places that people around me were actually visiting. Even better, there is a Hama Sushi inside Qiyi Plaza, right beside my school.

Since it had already opened next to my school, not going felt a little hard to justify.

So on May 2, 2026, I went in and had a big meal.

The Chinese title, "going to have a big conveyor-belt sushi meal", is borrowed from Crayon Shin-chan. I think it is perfect because it is not refined at all, and it does not pretend to be. It is just a very Shin-chan kind of happiness. You see conveyor-belt sushi, and you want to eat a big meal.

This meal was basically that.

The Hama Sushi beside my school is right here inside Qiyi Plaza.

I went relatively late and got seated almost without waiting. That part felt great.

There are hundreds of dishes on the tablet, and scrolling through them really does make you hungrier.

A row of soy sauce and seasoning bottles sits by the table, and the little ritual feeling arrives immediately.

The whole Hama Sushi routine is actually pretty good for going alone, or with one or two friends.

I went relatively late this time, so I got seated almost without waiting. That really added to the experience, because once conveyor-belt sushi starts with a queue, your expectation keeps rising. After you finally sit down, it is easy to order more with a bit of compensation in your head. Sitting down without waiting felt much smoother, like walking over from school and casually adding a small reward to the day.

After I sat down, the thing that really started making me lose control was the ordering tablet.

There were hundreds of items on it, sushi, sides, noodles, desserts, drinks, with all kinds of photos constantly coming at me. The key detail is that it does not let you add things to a cart first and then review everything at the end before placing the order.

You tap it, and it is ordered.

That design is powerful.

At first, you only want to see what else they have. But the menu is designed so carefully that, as you keep scrolling, thoughts like "this one looks worth trying too" keep popping up. Scroll back and forth a few more times, and your appetite gets pulled up round after round. Before you know it, you have ordered a few extra pieces of sushi.

You are not just ordering a meal.

You are constantly feeding coins into your own curiosity.

The first plate I ordered was caramel-seared salmon. That name is hard to resist. Seared, caramel, salmon. Put those three words together and it feels like the menu is actively pulling your hand toward it. After that, I ordered large-cut tuna and large-cut foie gras. One was a hit of red color; the other was the kind of thing where seeing the words foie gras makes you instinctively feel that you should try it.

Once those plates arrived, I roughly understood why conveyor-belt sushi has become so easy to like recently. It is not the kind of restaurant where you have to sit upright and evaluate everything seriously. It feels more like a small amusement park. Each plate is small, the pressure is small, and if you like something, you keep ordering. If you do not like one plate, it does not ruin the meal.

That part matters.

The caramel-seared salmon was one of my favorite plates from this meal.

Large-cut tuna. That red slice has presence as soon as it sits on the rice.

With the large-cut foie gras, that first mouthful of fatty aroma is very hard to resist.

Caramel, searing, and eel together are clearly aiming for a heavier kind of satisfaction.

That toasted seared layer makes it hard not to order a few more plates.

The caramel-seared series was the most memorable group in this meal, especially the caramel-seared salmon.

The salmon was rich in fat, and the first bite was soft and delicate. After biting into it, the experience did not end immediately. With the sushi rice, after a few more chews, the sweetness of the caramel, the aroma of the sear, and the salmon's own fatty fragrance slowly mixed together. By the end, my whole mouth was filled with that slightly toasted, rich feeling.

This was one of my favorite plates of the meal.

The large-cut foie gras was another one.

The outside of the foie gras carried a little seared aroma, and once it entered my mouth, that fatty fragrance was basically impossible to resist. Even more dangerous, the inside was extremely tender. It was not heavy in a stiff, forced way, but melted in my mouth like silken tofu, spreading that oily aroma through the whole mouth all at once.

By that point, I did not really want to describe it with professional words anymore.

Anyway, it was just happy. Umami~

The caramel-seared eel followed the same logic. Eel already has some weight to it, and after stacking caramel and searing on top, it is clearly aiming for richness. After it entered my mouth, the eel flavor and the fat under the eel skin pushed the happy mood up another notch.

Sometimes this is where conveyor-belt sushi wins. It lets you eat in a very unserious way. You can study the rice, fish, and sauce, or you can simply think that a plate looks good and tap it.

Then, a few minutes later, it slowly rolls toward you on the track.

Following that rhythm, I also ordered onsen egg udon, a tempura platter, and Japanese miso ramen.

Once these dishes arrived, the mood of the table changed immediately. Before, it was still the small happiness of plate after plate of sushi. Then suddenly, it became a proper dinner.

When the onsen egg udon first arrived, I honestly did not think there was anything especially new about it. It looked like a bowl of udon with an onsen egg, bonito flakes, and some tempura bits on top.

But once I mixed the onsen egg in, it became different.

The egg, the bonito flakes, and the small amount of broth at the bottom mixed together, and the freshness and smoothness came out all at once. The udon itself was slick and chewy. When it carried that broth and egg into the mouth, it was deeply satisfying. The tempura bits also gave little crunchy moments from time to time, so the bowl was not only soft and smooth, but had small surprises too.

Eating it was pure enjoyment.

Sushi takes care of curiosity, while noodles settle the stomach.

The onsen egg udon looked ordinary at first, but it turned into a surprise once mixed.

As soon as the golden, crispy tempura platter arrived, it added a full sense of ceremony to the table.

The joy of fried food is simple. The moment you pick it up, you can feel the crisp shell.

After eating a lot of cold dishes, a bowl of Japanese miso ramen adds some warm soup comfort to this conveyor-belt sushi meal.

The tempura platter was also a very steady presence.

Fried food does not need much complicated reasoning. As long as it is hot, crisp, and fragrant, it has already done its job. Ordering tempura in a conveyor-belt sushi restaurant feels subtle too. It is not the main character, but it makes the meal feel more complete.

By the time I ordered caramel-seared inari sushi, I had truly entered the state of wanting to try everything I saw.

That is the scary part of the ordering screen.

The menu is always there, the photos are always there, and the prices and portions do not make you hesitate for very long. You only wanted to take one more look, but your hand has already tapped.

The caramel-seared inari sushi, shellfish trio, and low-temperature roast beef all came from that state. They were not things I had planned from the beginning. They appeared because, in the second half of the meal, the menu could still show me something new. My curiosity had not fully stopped, so I added a few more plates along the way.

By the later part of the meal, I had already entered the state of wanting to try everything I saw.

The caramel-seared inari sushi slowly rolled toward me on the track, which gave it a nice little sense of ceremony.

My mouth filled with rice, the tofu pouch outside, and that toasted seared aroma. Very satisfying.

The shellfish trio added a little seafood curiosity to the meal, and the conch had a nice crunch.

The low-temperature roast beef came at the end as another temptation from the ordering system, but honestly, it was just okay.

Looking back at this meal now, I think the part most worth recording is not that any single dish was incredibly stunning.

It is that the whole process felt relaxed.

Walking over from beside school, entering Qiyi Plaza, sitting down, taking a number, ordering, and barely needing to talk to a server throughout the whole process. I just sat there quietly, looking through the endless dishes on the tablet, quietly thinking about what I should order, slowly considering which things were worth trying, and then waiting for the small plates to arrive one by one. Each plate felt like a small checkpoint, breaking an ordinary meal into many little moments of expectation.

That kind of expectation actually fits student life pretty well.

Classes, assignments, and deadlines often press down as one heavy block. But inside a conveyor-belt sushi restaurant, happiness gets sliced very small. A plate of salmon, a bowl of udon, a tempura platter, a receipt. Separately, none of them is a big event. Together, they make one evening feel very happy.

By the middle and later part of the meal, the table already showed clear signs of battle.

The receipt was the most honest ending to this meal. Next time I can get 10 yuan off too.

So if you ask me whether Hama Sushi is worth going to, my answer is probably yes. It is worth picking an evening when you are not in a hurry and going once.

Do not go with a very serious restaurant-review mindset.

Treat it as playing through a meal, experiencing that little sense of ceremony, trying ingredients you have not tried before, and feeling the happiness of ordering something you really like.

Order a few plates of sushi that interest you, order a warm bowl of noodles, and add something fried. At the end, when you look at the empty plates on the table and the receipt, you may find that the most interesting part of the meal is that it really does feel like the line in the title.

A big conveyor-belt sushi meal.