Quite possibly the greatest food bargain in Japan: tasty convenience store pasta for less than a buck

Casey Baseel

Mar 28, 2017

This chain’s 100-yen pasta and noodle dishes are just the thing when you’re looking to stretch your budget.

As we’ve often mentioned, convenience stores in Japan are pretty awesome. Not only are they stocked with all sorts of snacks and drinks, you can actually get sandwiches, rice balls, and bento boxed lunches of pretty good quality at reasonable prices.

The biggest convenience store chains in Japan are 7-Eleven, Family Mart and Lawson, but should you ever find yourself with the opportunity to stop into a branch of Seico Mart, you definitely should. See, while all Japanese convenience stores offer great value-for-money, Seico Mart has what might be the greatest deal of all: pre-made pasta dishes priced at just 100 yen (US$0.90)!

Even after you factor in Japan’s eight-percent consumption tax, each serving of Seico Mart pasta is still just 108 yen, which is less than a dollar at the current exchange rate. There’s actually a lot of variety in this extremely budget-friendly lineup, too.

On our trip to Seico Mart, we picked up chicken pepperoncino…

…creamy carbonara…

…chicken tomato sauce…

…Napolitan tomato sauce…

…and cream sauce with imitation crab.

Seico Mart even has a few Japanese-noodle options for 100 yen, like stir-fried pork yakiudon…

…and jaja yakisoba with minced meat and miso.

At 100 yen each, we weren’t expecting much in the flavor department, but it turns out Seico Mart’s pasta is pretty satisfying. The pepperoncino with chicken was one of the standouts in our taste test, with nice, firm noodles and juicy chunks of meat.

The carbonara, another high point of our Seico Mart raid, was creamy and flavorful, making it far better than we’d imagined something this cheap could be.

The vast majority of Seico Mart’s branches are in its home prefecture of Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s four main islands. The chain has been making some moves at moving southward, though, and it now has a handful of stores in Ibaraki as well as Saitama, the prefecture that neighbors Tokyo to the north. Here’s hoping the expansion continues, so that budget-conscious travelers and pasta fans all over the country can enjoy this lineup that both pleases the palate and is easy on the wallet.