Everyone knows convenience stores across Asia are full of great food you won’t find in Australia. However a lesser known fact is how many local Japanese people actually buy their meals from these places on a regular basis.
Places such as FamilyMart or Lawson are genuine places people buy their breakfast, lunch, snacks and dinner from.
This got me too curious to not try myself. So here is what I ate in 24 hours from just convenient store food in Japan.
Breakfast
Minced Tuna Onigiri – the onigiri was a great size. Once is already enough for a snack and two would make a meal.
Cooked Tuna with Mayo Onigiri – Seasoned great, with a nice amount of tuna mayo in the middle and I love the fact that seaweed is thick and crisp s it doesn’t go soft from the moisture in the rice.
Premium blend iced coffee – Not bad, I’m happy enough with it. The nice thing about the iced coffees in Japanese convenience stores is that you can microwave them to make it hot. But just to be sure, there should be a label on the bottle somewhere that indicates this for you.
Bread/ bun – I got this rather large bun with some sort of crust on top. It’s slightly sweet with not much of any distant flavour to it. But it wasn’t bad at all for a snack, just maybe not as a meal.
Lunch
Cheese, ham and cucumber sandwich – I have nothing bad to say about it. It’s a decent sandwich.
Bento box with fried rice, chicken Katsu, spaghetti and some potato salad – I’m not mad at this. I wasn’t expecting the Katsu to be crispy anyway because it’s been sitting in a box and reheated as well, but the flavours are there. The rice was alright, nicely seasoned.
Mango drink – Correction, I THOUGHT this was mango juice but it turned out to be one of those high fibre juice blends. It wasn’t bad. (You can’t really hate juice)
Dinner
Kitsune Udon – The udon is still a bit of a mystery to me. When you get it from the shelf the packet has no liquid in it, but after the cashier takes it out of the microwave there was broth in the bowl.
Either I didn’t pay attention and broth was added to it or Japanese food science is on a whole other level I do not recognise.
Overall it was satisfying. The udon isn’t anywhere as good as the ones you get at a restaurant, but it nowhere near inedible or bad. It’s actually not bad.
Pork rice – It was thin slices of pork over plain white rice. On one side there was a slight coating of some sort of soysauce and on the other plain pork seasoned with some black pepper. Super simple, but really yummy.
Tomato juice – This wasn’t my favourite. It tasted like diluted tomato sauce.
