Like personal jet packs and tiny pills that contain the nutritional value of a three-course meal, sushi was once the future. For approximately eight seconds, it was the new cod on the block, the great signifier of the embourgeoisification of the proletariat.

At the tail of the 1990s, eating sushi was a byword for being revoltingly metropolitan and overevolved. It was also a little sinister and fiendishly oriental; in an episode of The Simpsons a sushi restaurant had directions to the nearest hospital printed on the menu’s reverse.

And then sushi sort of disappeared, or at least it seemed to secrete itself in the seaweed more effectively. In many instances the cuisine was absorbed as an element in the more varied pan-Asiatic places that began springing up. Tapas supplanted sushi again as the theme of little high-street bistros. And then, like fondue and Monster Munch crisps, sushi assumed its place in the pantheon of slightly kitschy nostalgia finger foods.

It is saddening that I do not possess sufficient sociological insight to make total sense of the fact that a branch of Yo! Sushi, the Sainsbury’s of sushi that was founded in 1997, is the centrepoint of the recently opened Silverburn shopping centre on the southside of Glasgow. It’s confusing because if you were planning to open a concession in a shopping mall, sushi is the last foodstuff you’d choose to purvey and Silverburn is the last shopping mall you’d choose in which to purvey it.

This is, or was, Tommy Sheridan territory, an eternal stronghold of real Glaswegians being frightfully plain-spoken with one another, principally on the subject of the uncommon incidence of injuries to their faces. The subtle mysteries of sushi would cut little wasabi in Pollok, you’d assume; there is, I believe, a Greggs Steak Bake on Pollok’s municipal flag. It’s an interzone of estates and graffitied fridges in front gardens. It contains Nitshill.

And then, like the mothership in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, there is the Silverburn mall, a vast retail encampment on the fringes with a 24-hour Tesco and an unending supply of shops in which to buy presents for people you don’t entirely like. It has the eerie, still, glacial quality of a JG Ballard story.

The Yo! Sushi is open-plan, just plonked in the middle of the main concourse. You may well have forgotten Yo! Sushi’s USP. The food travels round the room on a looping conveyor belt. You pull up a stool beside it and lift off the bowls you want, colour-coded to indicate price, at will. You do this until the height of the pile of your dishes indicates that you have been mastered by laziness and greed.

Of course, the Yo! Sushi methodology seems a touch kidult; it’s wasteful and exasperating when dishes you like the look of decline to appear for long stretches. At the same time, it’s also one of those silly, cheerful novelties that make life worth living.

The Tokyo! Summer menu has just been launched. It includes a snow crab claw in breadcrumbs that’s a sight pleasanter and more crabby than the bizarre industrially spongy versions you find in most Chinese restaurants; there are some very meaty duck dumplings in brown rice miso and a spicy pepper squid equal to that in decent tapas places. There was a little dish made from rolls of wagyu beef, the stuff that gets fed beer and is massaged daily. Elsewhere on the menu were hairy prawns, large crustaceans in an oddly addictive overcoat of what seemed like Shredded Wheat, and seafood rice, perhaps the only disappointment among the welter of dishes, basically just some rice with seafood dropped artlessly atop.

Despite the chain’s rather dated reputation, the food here was prepared with the same attention and discrimination found in restaurant equivalents costing twice the price. It’s all so aggressively moderne and techno-centric that you have no choice but to take Yo! Sushi for what it is — a culinary toy shop for the disposably incomed, a carnival sideshow for those addicted to stimulus. None of this, however, means you won’t be quietly impressed by the food.

Yo! Sushi, Silverburn Centre, Barrhead Road, Glasgow, 0141 555 0042, dinner for two with wine £50

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