Featured

bento (Page 10)

This week in convenience store bento: Our top 5 new releases

Tuesday is known as New Bento Day at major convenience stores across Japan. As we’ve highlighted before, convenience stores in the country put a lot of effort into their ready-to-eat creations. What’s more is they cycle through new flavors on a weekly basis. This can be a double-edged sword as your favorite dish can disappear tragically fast, but you can also count on something equally good coming along as well.

As regular consumers of convenience store bento, the editorial department of RocketNews24 Japan has come together and ranked the top 5 new additions to 7-Eleven, Lawson, and Family Mart for the week of 14 January, 2014. Please refer to it for your own convenient dining pleasure.

Read More

Let’s celebrate “Good Teeth Day” with some smiley molar bentos!

Did you know that November 8 was “Good Teeth Day”? It’s just one of many little-known specially designated mini-holidays in Japan. And what better way to celebrate your pearly whites than with tooth-themed bentos! Take a look at a few clever lunchboxes showcased on Japanese cooking sites.

Read More

Malaysian food artist Samantha Lee serves up more platefuls of amazeballs

Imagine if your mom made you meals that became famous all over the world… you’d probably belong to the Clean Plate Club, right?

Malaysian food artist and mother of two Samantha Lee began by making Japanese lunch boxes (bento) in 2008 to encourage her elder daughter to eat independently. Bento boxes may be stylishly arranged and decorated to look like popular movie, TV or video game characters (kyaraben) or people, animals or buildings (oekakiben). There is some amazing bento art out there, but soon Lee was taking it to a new level on a daily basis.

Despite her lack of formal training, Lee’s creativity found an outlet in the incredibly detailed, cute and nutritious meals she painstakingly put together for her two girls, using only run-of-the-mill household tools like scissors and knives. She describes herself as “an ordinary, regular and average mom, crazy about making a mess in the kitchen.” Although she’s keeping her feet on the ground, her star has risen quickly in the international media in recent months, from Belgium to the Ukraine and all over the world. She now works as a kids party planner, doing sewing, crafting, baking and doodling in her spare time.

Check out her latest creations, including a step-by-step pictorial guide to crafting your own!

Read More

Would you eat this sushi, head to tail?

Ekiben, or “station bento,” can be found on train station platforms across Japan, conveniently packed for travelers too busy to prepare their own meal. They usually come in plastic or styrofoam containers wrapped with a decorative paper cover. But this ekiben is a little different. Found in Kochi Prefecture, this on-the-go bento is packaged in clear plastic wrap to display the goods inside, and what seems like merely a fish sitting in a white supermarket tray is actually sushi. Let’s take a closer look at this bizarre whole fish sushi ekiben.

Read More

How to Make a Hatsune Miku Bento

Hatsune Miku is now coming to a bento near you (that is if you have to time and patience to make her). The folks over at Japanese culture website, Kawaii Kakkoii Sugoi, have just created a step-by-step video explaining how to make an edible version of everyone’s favorite vocaloid.

Read More

Lunch Exchange: We Taste Test Japanese “Station Bentos” from New York’s Grand Central Station

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Tokyo Station as well as Grand Central Station, New York: two titans of transportation who have served their respective metropolises proud.

To honor this centennial, Grand Central hosted “Japan Week” which drew crowds to the already crowded terminal. Hearing of this, RocketNews24 sent a reporter to investigate the centerpiece of Japan Week; the ekiben counter!

Read More

According to a 2012 survey of 2,000 Shinsei Bank employees, the average worker now spends 510 yen (US $5.79) on lunch every day. That’s down from 710 yen (US $8.06) in 2001 and 600 yen (US $6.81) in 2007. That’s a 30% decrease in twelve years.

Nikkan Spa, a popular magazine in Japan, conducted its own survey and found an even bleaker outcome. In a survey of 100 salarymen (office workers) and public servants in their 30s and 40s, a surprising 64 percent of workers admitted that they spend 500 yen (US $5.67) or less on lunch. An even more astonishing 24 percent of workers get by on just 250 yen (US $2.84) a day.

A measly 250 yen (US $2.84) won’t even buy a beef bowl at Sukiya, famed to be the cheapest lunch around. If these salarymen can’t even afford the cheapest meals available for purchase, what exactly are they eating? Let’s take a peek inside the slimmed-down lunchboxes of Japan’s typical worker.

Read More

Wooden Playstation 3 Bentō Lunchbox Looks Just Like the Real Thing

You could be fooled into thinking that this is some enormous new add-on for the current Playstation 3 console, but what you’re actually looking at here is a multi-layered wooden bentō lunchbox sculpted and assembled by a master craftsman for Sony Japan.

Presented to staff at Square Enix and Konami in celebration of 25 years of Final Fantasy and Metal Gear games, these stunning lunchboxes are designed to look identical to Sony’s home console, featuring everything from the ridged top to the tiny silver Playstation logo on the front, all the while leaving plenty of room inside for a delicious lunch.

These things are so beautiful that it almost makes us want to trade in our plastic Playstation 3 for a wooden one…

Read More

Food Becomes Art: These Metal Gear and Final Fantasy Bentō Lunchboxes Will Blow Your Mind

“Hideo-kun! What do you want in your lunchbox for school tomorrow? Ham and cheese? Peanut butter and jelly? Or how about Solid Snaaaaaaaake!”

The image you see before you, ladies and gentlemen, is genuine, 100% completely edible food. We’ve seen colourful character bentō lunchboxes before, but this is something else.

As part of its 25 years of Metal Gear and Final Fantasy celebrations, Japanese game developer Konami has had a set of truly amazing lunchboxes made for a photo event. Featuring characters from both of the long-running series, the lunchboxes are so detailed that they almost look like waxworks. No matter how many times we look at these things, we can’t quite get over the fact that it’s actually food.

Read More

Breakthrough in Plastic Bag Technology Promises a More Stable Future

Plastic shopping bags are one of those things that haven’t been improved on since… ever?  Sure there have been attempts to improve their biodegradability, but that’s hardly the limit to their inherent weaknesses.

This is especially well-known in Japan where premade soups and bentos fly off the shelves of supermarkets and convenience stores like premade hotcakes.  Using a traditional plastic bag to carry a curry rice bento always gets tilted onto its side so that it ends up looking like a crime scene when you get it home.  You’re luck if the curry actually stays inside the container.

Lunch Vehicle may be the answer to this problem, taking plastic bags to the next level with its innovative design which has been influenced by tried and tested heavy industry techniques.

Read More

A lone salaryman walks in to a room with bento in hand and sits down at a table to enjoy his lunch in privacy. He unties the knot holding together the bandana bundle to reveal a small brown bento box and chopsticks case. Finally, the man removes the lid from the bento to unveil a mouth-watering assortment of…colored yarn?

What follows is some hardcore lunchtime needlework.

Read More

How to Make a Horror Bento, Perfect for Fights with Loved Ones

We’ve covered the phenomenon of charabens in the past ranging from the extremely cute to the downright bizarre. However, as with any art form, the horror genre cannot be left out.  Inspired by some photos of horror bentos found online a reporter from the website Pouch, Hotaru Yamakawa, has decided to make her own series of 3 horror bentos and help you make your own.

Read More

  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. 4
  6. 5
  7. 6
  8. 7
  9. 8
  10. 9
  11. 10