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For a Westerner in Japan, breakfast is just incorrect. If North Americans living in Japan had to pick the one thing they miss most about home, a lot of them would probably scream, “Breakfast food!” Traditional Japanese breakfast is completely different and usually consists of rice, fish and miso soup. It’s boring, lacking in any real taste and basically good for you, unlike our favorite breakfast dishes. Of course, some places serve a “Western-style” breakfast, but that usually includes ham that they call “bacon”, in other words, facon! Get outta here you fake bacon!

So when 7-Eleven dropped this “Eggs Benedict Sandwich” onto its shelves, we figured it couldn’t possibly be worse than any other breakfast food out there, or could it?  Better prepare yourself Eggs Benny, we won’t play nice. Get ready for the toughest food review yet!

It always starts with a random venture to the convenience store to find a drink or a quick snack and ends up being an adventure. There is a new food to try? Excellent, throw it in the basket! So when we saw this non-assuming plastic wrapped English muffin sandwich on the shelf, we only gave it a cursory glance because it was new. But then we read:

Eggs Benedict Style Muffin
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No way! Hollandaise sauce, ham, and egg sandwich?!? We looked at the main ingredients.

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Muffin, half-boiled egg, bologna sausage, and hollandaise sauce! Pretty much the same! But, hollandaise sauce in Japan?  That is a tough sauce to get right and already so many Western foods have been ruined by Japanese hands.

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After heating it up (500W, 1 min or 1500W, 20 sec) we delicately started to unwrap the packaging.

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The wrapping was obviously done this way so that someone could use it to hold the sandwich and catch any sauce droppings.

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It definitely smells like hollandaise sauce. Let’s inspect it a little more.

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▼Tater Tots not included. 

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The egg certainly wasn’t runny like the picture indicated, but that was the least of our worries. It’s the sauce that remains questionable. Here goes nothing.

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It’s actually pretty close to what real eggs benedict tastes like! The hollandaise sauce is definitely not made from scratch but it could compete with any of the instant sauces in the States. The ham is thick enough to provide its own distinct taste and the egg completes the sandwich. It is certainly not the best eggs benedict ever, but it’s an adequate substitute for one you could find in a restaurant. While it is a bit pricey at 320 yen (about US $2.75) for only one sandwich, it seems to be available any time of the day, as long as it’s in stock. Our final thoughts?

▼It rocks! 

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Images: RocketNews24