Last night after our adventures at the Botanic Garden, we needed something to eat, fast. So we went to Sushi Station, which filled the main criteria: it was nearby, fast, and cheap-ish.

Unlike another sushi place we’ve been to with a train motif, this one has a refrigerated case covering the “sushi line,” and plates of nigiri and such travel along a belt made up of interlocking discs (each one has a bite taken out of it, to allow for the next disc upline to rotate around the corners).

It’s good, it’s quick, it’s pretty inexpensive — and then I realized they’d added a little toy sushi train on 3 different plates, probably as a spacer so they know how long a given dish has been on the line.

So the photo of the sushi choo-choo is now in the “Stupid Cameraphone Trix” section, along with a picture of the little sign attesting to the freshness of the fish. I’m assuming the Japanese characters are a translation of the English romaji, or vice-versa.

It’s a fun restaurant – the music is highly variable, last night they were playing jazz. They use an automatic welcome-machine at the door that says “Welcome” in Japanese in a very high-pitched voice, but everyone else on the staff calls out “welcome,” too. The colors are odd and garish, and it attracts a lot of Japanese families and lots of ex-pat types living in the States. For this reason, I had a mild flashback to my solo trip to Japan — it was possible to pretend I was in a robo-sushi joint somewhere near the commuter rail station in a large city.

They’re located in Rolling Meadows — which is actually “flat stripmalls,” but they couldn’t really name the town that, could they?