No raw deal at Yo! Sushi

This review was first published in January 2001

It was in a film made in 1936 called Modern Times that Charlie Chaplin satirised the increasing automation of life. I remember one scene in which the diminutive comic sat down to an automated lunch, with everything from soup bowls to napkins operated by machine: it degenerated into exquisitely timed slapstick. How Sir Charles's fans must have bent double at the hilarity of it all, safe in the knowledge that such a ludicrous fantasy could never come to pass.

Well it has. Conveyor-belt sushi is a fact of modern London life. Ten or 15 years ago, this would have been the sort of thing that Clive James would have put on the telly for us smug Westerners to laugh at. Now the future is here and it is orange and purple, the corporate colours of Yo! Sushi.

Yo! is not a restaurant chain, it is a way of life, as I began to realise after I was sent something called The Book of Yo!. Written by proprietor Simon Woodroffe, this is a monstrous exercise in vanity - a sort of Das Kapital for the soundbite generation written by, or for, Forrest Gump.

I do not know Simon Woodroffe, but I imagine he is a perfectly nice guy, the sort of person who uses terms like 'quality time' and 'bonding' without a shred of irony.

Having flicked through this book - Simon encourages one to 'dip in and out' - I would say that Mr Woodroffe has been on too many self-development seminars and had a very successful business idea. He's probably the sort of person who rates the Little Book of Calm above Machiavelli's The Prince or Plato's Republic.

It is often the way with successful businesspeople that they begin to believe they are mystics or philosophers. Woodroffe has the thoughts that we all have every day. The only difference is that he has the money and the sense of self-importance to publish them in a book, garnished with canap?-sized pieces of wisdom from such icons as mass murderer Chairman Mao and the manager of the Irish rugby team. For this publication, he charges £6.

Why can't businessmen just stick to their businesses? The thing is that Yo! is actually rather good. Nobu it ain't, but as a weird, fun-packed, optical nerve-tingler of an experience, I have to admit that Woodroffe is on the money here.

I visited the new Yo! Sushi in Clerkenwell with the next editor of the FT; a man who has just returned from travelling in the footsteps of Tamburlaine; and one of his travelling companions with whom he had traversed the Sahara or the Gobi, maybe both. As a quartet, we were about as unrepresentative of the typical Yo! customer as I imagine it is possible to be. And we all enjoyed it hugely.

The Yo! experience is powerful stuff, enhanced by screens showing Japanese cartoons, and the unreal neon Yo! glow. From the moment you are seated and your waiter talks you through the features of your eating station - red 'call' button, fizzy water dispenser, condiments, colour-coded pricing structure of plates etc - a powerful and competitive urge takes hold.

As the sushi rolls (pun intended) by, the punter is possessed by a desire to shovel as much stuff off the belt and into his or her mouth. It is relatively inexpensive - we ate to excess, sank several bottles of lager from the chill cabinet that belts out a pre-recorded message every time you go near it, and still had change from a hundred-pound note. That included a reasonably generous tip to the enthusiastic staff.

The food is palatable to mediocre - nothing special. However, so remarkably presented and reasonably priced is the offering that one is inclined to forgive its shortcomings. I ceased to care that almost every sort of raw fish that I ordered from the wipe-clean picture-book-style menu was unavailable. Nor did I mind that the one special I ordered - noodles with fried prawn, a sad affair consisting of two prawns and some greasy spaghetti strands - was an insult.