Unless sushi train restaurants add a new dish to their menus, the wasteful trend looks set to continue.
revolving sushi (Page 7)
We aren’t sure whether to call it a dessert or a drink, but we do know you can have it at a conveyor belt sushi chain!
If you sliced the fish small enough, you could actually use this like a tiny version of the real thing.
Even if you don’t speak Japanese, if you’re a sushi lover, you’ve probably heard some of the language’s fish-based vocabulary. Maguro is pretty readily understood as “tuna” among foodies with a palate for Japanese cuisine, and many people who can’t put together a complete sentence in Japanese still know that uni is sea urchin, for example.
Not as many non-Japanese speaking diners are as familiar with the word iwashi, or sardine, though. Although sardine sushi isn’t unheard of, it definitely trails in popularity behind less fishy-tasting fare, and its relatively low price and humble image mean it doesn’t have the same level of pizazz as a seaweed-wrapped pile of ikura (salmon roe) or a glistening cut of otoro (extra fatty tuna belly).
Visual impact isn’t a problem, though, for one Japanese restaurant chain’s latest creation: the Whole Sardine Sushi Roll.
In 2013, Japan saw a meteoric rise in internet photos that depict part-time workers’ silly and sometimes idiotic antics while on the clock (remember the freezer diving phenomenon?). Though the term “bakattā” (a portmanteau word that’s not restricted to part-timers and combines baka, or idiot, and tsuittaa, the Japanese pronunciation of Twitter) was coined back in 2010, it gained even more popularity last year and took fourth place in the 2013 Internet Buzzword Awards, sponsored by the Tokyo company Mirai Kensaku Brazil.
The craze of bragging about law-breaking or idiotic behavior on social networking sites has thankfully died down, partly due to publicization of the serious repercussions faced by some perpetrators. However, it seems like a couple of young guys working at a major revolving sushi chain had not been watching the news, or were looking to get fired: a photo uploaded on the evening of September 24 with a Tweet that said, “I invented a new menu item with [name deleted] today! Lololol” spread like wildfire, only to reach the head of the company by the following morning. D’oh!
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