Sushiro opened its first Thailand branch five years ago and I was there within the week. I have been going back ever since, including the visit that produced this post. The food has stayed as consistent as the queues have stayed terrible, which is why it pays to know how the system works. Here is how to eat at a Japanese conveyor sushi chain in Bangkok without giving up two hours of your evening: which branch to pick, how the plates and the iPad ordering work and what belongs on your table.

Go Early Or Go To Bangna

Every Sushiro branch I know of in Bangkok has a queue to match its popularity. Turn up at a peak hour after work on a weekday and you are looking at a wait of two to three hours, which no sushi on a belt is worth.

There are two ways around it. The first is timing: arrive before 11am or in the lull between lunch and dinner and you will be seated immediately or within 15 minutes at worst. The second is the branch itself. PARC Bangna is a small development out east that opened recently enough that not many people seem to know it exists yet, so the queue there is a fraction of what the mall branches suffer. It has become my regular for exactly that reason.

You can join the queue two ways: walk in and take a ticket at the front desk or book ahead on the official Sushiro app, which is free on the App Store and Play Store. The app comes with one warning. A booking is not a check-in, so when you arrive you still need to tell the front desk that you booked online. Skip that step and the system quietly skips you, leaving you to watch walk-ins get seated while your number never comes up.

Cars parked outside the Sushiro branch at PARC Bangna.
The PARC Bangna branch sits in a new development off the Bangna-Trat road, away from the mall queues.

How The Plate System Works

Every plate is colour-coded and the colour is the price: white is ฿30, red is ฿40, silver is ฿60, gold is ฿80 and black is ฿100, with a 10% service charge going on top at the till. When you finish a plate, stack it with its colour mates on the aisle edge of the table so the staff can count the stacks, print the bill and hand you a payment card to take to the cashier. Whatever you do, do not put a plate back on the belt.

In-store sign showing Sushiro plate colours priced from ฿30 to ฿100.
The plate colours carry the prices. The sign also asks you to stack finished plates by colour at the edge of the table.

The belt is the shop window, not the menu. The full range lives on the iPad at your table, which switches to English, takes orders four dishes at a time and sends them down a private express lane above the main belt. Fresh from the kitchen beats well travelled, so I order most of the meal there and treat the belt as a lucky dip. Take your plates off the express lane promptly, because the next round cannot be served until you do.

Table iPad at Sushiro showing the ordering menu in English.
The iPad carries the full menu and takes four dishes per order. Fresh orders arrive on the express lane above the belt.

The green tea is free and self-service, with a small black shaker of matcha powder on the table and a hot water tap beside it. Go easy on the powder: a light shake makes tea, while a heavy hand makes something bitter enough to ruin the next three plates.

What To Order

Start with the otoro, the fatty cut of tuna that arrives on a gold ฿80 plate and melts the moment it lands on your tongue. Five years of visits and it has never once disappointed me. If you order nothing else from the iPad, order this.

The surprise of the visit came from the side menu: sweet potato tempura, hot and sweet under the batter and gone embarrassingly fast because I could not stop eating it.

Three pieces of sweet potato tempura in a paper-lined dish beside a cup of green tea.
The sweet potato tempura from the side menu, the unexpected best order of the visit.

Then there is the plate nobody cares about: cucumber maki, the cheapest thing in the restaurant on a white ฿30 plate. Cold rice and crisp cucumber with soy sauce and a dab of wasabi is exactly the reset your mouth wants between richer plates. I love it and I will not apologise for it.

Cucumber maki rolls on a white Sushiro plate.
Cucumber maki on the cheapest plate in the building. Refreshing where everything around it is rich.

The desserts are decent too. My habit is to finish with the panna cotta, which has closed more of my visits than I can count, though not this time. We were simply too full, which tells you how the plates stack up.

Sushiro is a chain and I mean that as a compliment, because the point of a chain is that it is the same every time. Five years in, it still is.

What Two People Pay

My wife and I ate more than we planned to and the bill came to ฿1,518 before a credit card promotion at the till brought it down to ฿1,368. It is worth checking your bank's app before you pay, because the discount cost us nothing but a tap.

For a sushi dinner for two that started with otoro and ended with neither of us wanting dessert, I find ฿1,518 hard to argue with. Five years on, Sushiro is still the meal I measure every other conveyor sushi place against. Go early, go to Bangna and start with the otoro.