A Conveyor-Belt Regular
Sits at the Omakase Counter

A conveyor-belt regular, at the counter

The restaurant is about a five-minute walk from the Ritz-Carlton, where a friend was staying. This is the corner of Kuala Lumpur with the densest cluster of luxury hotels: the JW Marriott next door to the Ritz-Carlton, the Westin beyond it, the Pavilion Hotel run by Banyan Tree, and a little further on, Banyan Tree itself. Omakase diners walk over from their hotels. As a business location, you could not ask for more.

The place is Iki Omakase, in KL’s Imbi district. It serves no pork, and lunch omakase starts at RM238 (about ¥9,200). Our omakase that day came to over RM400 (about ¥15,500). In yellow plates, that is some 220 plates. Each plate is about 2 cm thick, so stacked up they would reach 4.4 metres. Starting from the table top, that is the ceiling, twice. For the record, eight yellow plates fill me up. So this one lunch was worth 27 trips to the conveyor belt. On Google it has a 4.9 rating from more than 900 reviews.

There were three others with me: a fellow school dad who runs omakase restaurants in Japan, the president of a nori company I know, and the Malaysia head of a trading company that handles Japanese ingredients. The man who runs the sushi restaurant, the man who wraps the sushi, the man who ships the sushi toppings. And then me, with no particular interest in sushi. Life sometimes miscasts.

I do have an excuse for that lack of interest. Both my parents come from Matsumoto, in Nagano prefecture: surrounded by 3,000-metre mountains, the last Galápagos of Japanese ingredients. As a child, my grandfather told me that fish from the sea, carried over the mountains, would turn completely black by the time it arrived; tuna would arrive already marinated in soy. Whether that is true, I cannot say. But my knowledge of sushi, it seems, also turned black somewhere on the way over the mountains.

I have several good friends among the school dads who run omakase restaurants in Kuala Lumpur, too. Not that they stand behind the counter themselves: they are all investors and business owners. There are not, in fact, that many Japanese families living in Malaysia together. Most are mothers and children here for education, and households where the father lives here too are nearly all run by business owners of some kind. So gather the school dads, and somehow you get a room full of company presidents. More on that, along with how hard it is for fathers to get a visa, soon.

Once seated, I could not settle. No plates came gliding past. No touch screen. In front of me, one chef with a knife, making one piece at a time, just for me. At the conveyor belt, I choose the plate. Here, the plate chooses me.

What omakase actually is

“Omakase” means, literally, “I leave it to you”: you leave it to the chef what to make, and in what order. It saves you the trouble of reading a menu, and of turning pale at the prices. The latter arrives, all at once, with the bill.

Its roots lie in the Edo-style sushi of the late Edo period, when some customers began leaving the order of the pieces to the chef, and it took shape from there. It settled into a way of ordering after the war, credited to a chef known as “the emperor of sushi”. The word spread in Japan’s bubble era, yet until the early 2000s it was, if anything, the beginner’s way to order. Connoisseurs ordered okonomi, choosing for themselves. Fashion turns inside out every twenty years, just like the width of a tie.

Britannica is more candid. It says omakase spread so that newly rich diners who knew little about sushi or fish could avoid revealing what they did not know. For someone like me who knows nothing about sushi, there is no kinder system. I can sit there knowing nothing, wearing the face of a connoisseur.

Omakase goes global

It was New York that made omakase a world word. Masa, opened in 2004, became shorthand for fine dining with its $300-a-head omakase. The 2011 film Jiro Dreams of Sushi lit the fuse. People all over the world tried to book a tiny restaurant in a Ginza basement, and failed.

What came next is the interesting part. The median omakase in New York has fallen to $110. Of the omakase-only restaurants that opened in the decade to 2019, half have closed. The closure rate for ordinary sushi restaurants is 8%, so that is more than six times higher. Omakase is glamorous, and unforgiving. The diners who leave it to the chef go home full; half the restaurants they left it to never come back.

Kuala Lumpur, too, has omakase from RM118 entry-level counters to places charging over RM1,000. The top of the sushi map turned out to be wider than I thought.

Japanese restaurants abroad have multiplied in barely more than a decade: from about 55,000 in 2013 to about 187,000 in 2023. In 2025 the count fell for the first time on paper, to about 181,000. But that is the large fall in China, which, given the state of the world, is a separate story from the global trend. In North America, numbers are still rising. How many of them are sushi restaurants, nobody officially counts. But when people abroad were asked their favourite Japanese food, sushi and sashimi took 35%, far ahead of ramen in second place (9%). Sushi remains the face of Japanese food. Ramen, let us say, has the stomach instead.

Across Southeast Asia, Japanese restaurants themselves are multiplying. In 2025 Indonesia had 6,580, Thailand 5,920 and Malaysia 2,200; Malaysia’s count rose 16% in two years. Singapore, meanwhile, had 1,140, slightly fewer. Per 100,000 people, Singapore has about 20 and Malaysia about 7. Malaysia still has room to grow. Singapore’s dip may simply be a lack of places to put them: the whole country is about the size of Tokyo’s 23 wards, so who can blame it. I say this with love, having lived there for many years.

How popular it is, I learned in the car home. I had a driver pick me up for my next appointment. The moment I got in, the questions came: “You went to OMAKASE! So jealous! How much was it? Was it good?” He knew the restaurant’s name and the going rates better than I did. Clearly better than me, the Japanese one. Omakase is already a Malaysian word.

How is it different from the yellow plates?

Let me compare it with the RM1.80-a-plate conveyor-belt sushi I ate recently.

Price

Conveyor belt: RM1.80–3.70 a plate. Omakase: from RM238 at lunch. This day, over RM400.

Ordering

Conveyor belt: you choose from the lane and the touch screen. Omakase: you leave it to the chef.

Speed

Conveyor belt: plates keep coming. Omakase: one piece at a time, at the pace of the chef’s hands.

Toppings

Conveyor belt: the stars are blowtorched fish and mentai mayo. Omakase: the stars are ageing and knife work. Mentai mayo never appeared once.

Nori

Conveyor belt: I did not notice it was there until told. Omakase: you smell it before it reaches your mouth.

I put the price range on a chart. From eight yellow plates to high-end omakase: roughly 60 times. It is rare for food going by the same name, “sushi”, to span such a range. The range of my sushi knowledge, by the way, is probably about two times.

Count the chain outlets, and the map gets clearer. Malaysia has about 2,200 Japanese restaurants. The main sushi chains alone account for 223, roughly one in ten. Split those sushi chains by who owns them, and 98% are Malaysian. Japanese capital: just Sushiro’s three outlets. Sushi King was started by a Japanese entrepreneur in 1995, but is now a subsidiary of the Malaysian listed company Texchem. As for Sushi Zanmai, it has nothing whatsoever to do with Tsukiji’s Sushizanmai. Malaysia’s sushi is in Malaysian hands. Local chains hold the bottom of the map; at the top, omakase counters run by Japanese chefs and chefs trained in Japan compete. The middle is still empty.

There was a reason for the difference in the nori. This restaurant’s nori is supplied by the company of the president sitting next to me. Praising nori in front of its maker is a little awkward, but that crispness, and the aroma that rises before it even reaches your mouth, leave no choice. With him watching from the next seat, I will not deny that the praise may carry a small surcharge. Same name, “nori”, and yet such a difference.

To be honest, I do not remember well what I ate. What I remember is sea urchin, milt, shellfish, nameko mushrooms: a parade of things I do not like. And yet all of it was delicious. I surprised myself. Omakase, it turns out, means leaving even your dislikes to the chef. And having left them, they stopped being dislikes.

The head chef is not Japanese. Even so, said my school-dad friend who runs omakase restaurants in Japan, he has clearly trained for a long time. A professional’s eye for another professional is far more reliable than my eye for sushi. All I can tell is that the plates are not going round.

In Japanese restaurants abroad, nine in ten cooks are not Japanese, apparently. Think about it, and it makes sense. When I go back to Japan, my Japanese sometimes will not come out. At those moments, the growing number of shop staff who speak English or Chinese are a quiet help. High-end sushi in Kuala Lumpur is the same. At the counter, you talk more with the chef than with the friends you came with. So a chef who speaks Chinese, English and Malay and trained in Japan suits the customers here better. A chef who is not Japanese is well suited to high-end sushi in Kuala Lumpur. A little ironic, perhaps, but omakase means leaving even the conversation to the chef.

Through a business lens

While I had the chance, I asked my school-dad friend who runs omakase restaurants in Japan what makes omakase good. The answer came back not in the language of food, but of business. Occupational hazard, so here are four lessons.

First, it travels well. With a single menu, the restaurant can be small. A counter and a chef, and it opens in the same form in any country. Even in Japan, omakase needs no language, which suits foreign visitors.

Second, chefs develop faster. If the order of the pieces is fixed, so is what they need to learn. Polishing one sequence is quicker than preparing for dozens of à la carte orders.

Third, it can use cheap, excellent ingredients. Since the customer does not order, the restaurant can pick whatever fish is the best value and the best quality at the market that day. Not letting the customer choose makes purchasing stronger. It looks as if the customer is the one handing over control; in fact it is the purchasing that gains its freedom.

Fourth, competition is intensifying. New York’s numbers have already shown us: more omakase restaurants, lower prices, half gone. Kuala Lumpur looks to be setting off down the same road.

Let me add one observation of my own. For a Japanese food company, an omakase counter is also a place to set its products before the most discerning customers there are. A single sheet of nori becomes a brand showcase.

Quantum of Omakase

Twist the Bond film Quantum of Solace, and you get Quantum of Omakase. Leaving it to the chef did pay off. Having eaten from the yellow plates first, I could tell.

When I got home and told the children, they said they wanted to go to Sushiro in Kuala Lumpur. Very kind of them. But Sushiro’s cheapest plate is RM5.80: more than three times a yellow plate. For me, that is still a splurge.

Still, where the children take me will probably go on being the conveyor belt. And I will gladly follow. To be honest, I love eating lean tuna, egg and fried-prawn nigiri at the conveyor belt too. While stacking up a few yellow plates.