The battle towards comfort retailer value creep heats up.
There’s a value creep drawback occurring at Japanese comfort shops. Not too terribly way back, it was fairly straightforward to place collectively a meal that will fill you up for round 500 yen (US$3.40), however these days comfort retailer bento boxed lunches are beginning to get nearer to 1,000. Attempting to remain properly underneath that restaurant lunch-level value threshold is historically why lots of people search for one thing to eat at comfort shops within the first place, however in the event you’re going to be paying roughly the identical as you’ll for sit-down service in a restaurant, why hassle?
Mercifully, 7-Eleven Japan appears to have grow to be conscious of that rising sentiment, they usually’re making an attempt to revive their picture by their Ureshii Ne, or “Completely satisfied Worth,” line. Beginning with just a few types of rice balls this previous July, the Ureshii Ne lineup consists of easy, long-selling favorites at decreased costs, and as a part of the road’s growth 7-Eleven has simply added three extra budget-friendly Ureshii Ne rice dishes.
All three of them are priced at 348 yen (US$2.35), which might have been a beautiful value even earlier than the purportedly provide chain and forex conversion-triggered shopper value hikes Japan has seen over the previous few years. However even in the event you’re not paying very a lot, you’re nonetheless losing cash if the meals tastes dangerous or the portion is unreasonably small, so we rushed out to attempt all three of the brand new Ureshii Ne choices to see how they felt on our style buds and in our bellies.
The primary of the trio is a fried rice, or chahan, bowl…
…the second is Indian-style butter hen curry, with white rice beneath…
…and the third is a mabodon, or spicy mapo tofu over rice.
Style-testing duties fell to our Japanese-language reporter P.Ok. Sanjun, and he’s completely satisfied to report that all three of them style similar to you’d count on of 7-Eleven Japan, which is to say that they’re tasty and high-quality, with satisfyingly sturdy flavors that don’t attempt to do something too intelligent for their very own good. In the event you’ve ever had any of those dishes in Japan and loved them, it’s a really protected wager that you simply’ll just like the Ureshii Ne variations of them.
Are they sufficient to fill you up, although? Heading to the SoraNews24 technical testing laboratory, P.Ok. used a few of our precision tools (a kitchen scale) to find out that the mabodon is the heavyweight of the trio, coming in at 400 grams (14.1 ounces)…
…whereas the butter hen weighed 380 grams…
…and the fried rice 327 grams.
That’s truly a reasonably large hole, so the mapo tofu and curry are those you’ll wish to select in the event you’re feeling particularly hungry.
Having tried all of them, P.Ok. thinks they’ll do a good job tiding you over in instances of average urge for food, however they may not be fairly sufficient for habitually massive eaters or individuals who’re already near ravenous after they stroll into 7-Eleven. On the plus facet, being in a comfort retailer means it’s straightforward to complement any of those with a rice ball or different small pre-prepared facet dish in the event you’re extra-hungry on that day, and with 7-Eleven planning so as to add extra of these to the Ureshii Ne line within the weeks to come back, all three of those rice dishes are making us fairly completely satisfied.
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