The sushi belt only switched on after the ball pit shut for the night, and now it has stopped turning for good.
Mino Sushi Conveyor, the revolving sushi setup that ran out of Mino Club Cafe in Richmond, has closed permanently.
A notice taped to the door laid out the announcement in English and Chinese.
“We will be open until June 21,” it read, above a second line in red: “We will CLOSE PERMANENTLY on June 22.”
That puts the belt’s run at roughly four months from when we first covered it in February.
The format was the whole appeal.
During the day, the room worked as a kids indoor playground and cafe, ball pit and slides and all.
Once the playground shut down at 5PM, staff hung floor-to-ceiling Japanese festival banners to curtain off the play structure, lined tables along one wall, and started the belt.
Order something off-menu and it arrived on a miniature train running its own track above the conveyor.
When we visited early in their opening, prices sat where a family could say yes without doing math, starting at $2.80 for a single-colour plate, $3.80 for a wave plate, and $5.80 for a Japanese lace plate.
Then the rest of the business went up for sale.
On July 9, the Mino Kids World account posted the playground and cafe as a turnkey listing, advertising the restaurant permit, health permit, indoor playground, and early learning and after-school program approvals as a package.
“The owner is relocating, so the business is priced for a quick sale,” the post read.
The listing described the playground side only.
It said nothing about the conveyor belt, which suggests the sushi sode of things does not come back even if someone buys the room.
According to our source, the shutdown comes down to a personal family matter rather than financial trouble.
That distinction is worth sitting with.
The economy has been brutal on food businesses, and it is easy to read every closure notice as another casualty of costs.
Plenty are.
But restaurants also close because an owner gets sick, because a family needs to move, because a landlord raises rent past reason, or because the building is coming down.
A closure notice does not always tell you which one you are looking at.
What Richmond loses in the meantime is a genuinely strange night out: sushi on a belt, in a room built for six-year-olds, with the slides hidden behind a curtain.
Mino Sushi Conveyor now joins other recently closed Richmond food spots like Bruno at the Versante Hotel, Broli Kitchen in Blundell Centre, and Hazukido Cafe Plus at Aberdeen Centre.
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Address: 120-8171 Ackroyd Road, Richmond, BC