Our reporter Meg ventures waist-deep in carbs to discover a new way to enjoy Subway — and she may never turn back.
fast food (Page 39)
Last year about 5 million Chinese tourists visited Japan, and Chinese website NetEase was kind enough to compile a list of seven of Japan’s most unusual habits according to them.
With so many celebrities and businesses with their own social media accounts, how can you make sure you attract users and get them to follow you? McDonald’s does it by making you see their food in a whole new way.
The beleaguered fast-food giant wants everyone in Japan to know that it is now your one-stop spot for decadent Viennese Sachertortes and delectable Chocolat Zuccotto.
Popular Japanese fast food chain Mos Burger has opened a new restaurant that serves gourmet meals, alcohol and a special vegetarian burger made from a whole tomato.
The legendary California burger joint says it will open its first Japan location in March 2016, to the delight of Tokyo expats and Japanese alike.
If we had to pick one thing that represented how Japanese food maybe isn’t quite as healthy as generally perceived, it would probably have to be the bento lunchbox. Bento are readily available practically everywhere in Japan—when not being handmade for you by a parent or spouse, usually in the shape of Pokémon characters and the like—and are widely consumed by office workers and other day laborers as a cheap, convenient lunch.
Despite healthy origins back in the old days, bento—perhaps by design—have become increasingly unhealthy, with your standard box available from a retailer or food truck usually weighing in at a thousand calories (or frequently even more) and containing a bunch of fried food in addition to huge portions of rice.
But heck, when a filling, albeit cholesterol and calorie-packed bento sets you back only a measly 200 yen (US$1.50) over at discount supermarket Lamu, well, we’ll happily do the extra time on the treadmill.
We visited the all-you-can-eat KFC buffet restaurant in Japan before the official opening day and found more than just fried chicken on the menu. There’re also pastas, soups, breads, sweets, and even an all-you-can-drink beer plan!
Some of you may remember us reporting on a new promotional campaign by Burger King for their new Big King 4.0 burger. Called the Big ( ) Discount it is assumed that bringing in a Big Mac or receipt from a Big Mac will knock 120 yen (US$1) off the price of a Big King.
However, aside from pictorial allusions nowhere do they explicitly state that it has to be a Big Mac. They simply offer a discount for a “big something-something,” so our reporter Seiji Nakazawa went to his local Burger King with a bag full of “big” stuff such as candy and Mr. Big albums in the hopes of big savings. You’ll be surprised how for it got him.
For companies in the fast food hamburger business, there’s no way of getting around the fact that they’re in competition with McDonald’s. So instead of trying to tiptoe around the situation, Burger King Japan has decided to try to tackle its rival head-on with the new Big King 4.0 sandwich, which Burger King has just introduced to the Japanese market.
If you’ve got burgers on the brain, the name Big King no doubt reminds you of McDonald’s Big Mac, and that’s fine with Burger King. As a matter of fact, thanks to an unusual promotion going on right now, Burger King will give you a discount on a Big King if you bring in a receipt showing you recently bought a Big Mac, or, even stranger, if you bring in the actual McDonald’s hamburger itself.
Earlier this week, our hearts were Kentucky-fried aflutter over the news that KFC will soon be opening an all-you-can-eat buffet in Osaka. As it turns out, though, that’s not the only big development for the restaurant chain. Right now, the world’s most popular fried chicken outfit has added something to the menu of its Japanese restaurants that we never thought we’d see at KFC: hamburgers!
Yaki udon, a Japanese stir-fried noodle dish made with thick, flat wheat noodles, is a popular and much-loved staple of Japanese cuisine. Both yaki udon and yakisoba—a similar dish which uses a thinner buckwheat noodle instead—are cheap, tasty, and readily available from many street food stalls and Japanese-style pubs). So when one of our RocketNews24 Japan reporters read that not only had a yaki udon restaurant opened up in Kenya, but that it was that it was a huge hit with the locals, he just had to check it out for himself.
Read on for our Japanese reporter’s restaurant review as he travels halfway across the world for a bowl of noodles.
There’s no denying McDonald’s Japan has had rough time these past few years, with incidents like the spoiled meat scandal contributing to declining sales. To complicate matters further, some of the fast food chain’s campaigns and initiatives, like the sudden removal of menus from its counters (which have since been reinstated), have been met with confusion if not outright anger from Japanese customers. Now, it seems McDonald’s has captured the Japanese Internet’s attention again with what could well be their strangest campaign ever.
McDonald’s Japan will be releasing a new line of “affordably priced” burgers on October 26. And while that’s all fine and well, it’s their special one-day promotion in which they’ll be giving away these new burgers for free that has been raising eyebrows due to its bizarre catch.
Our Japanese reporter Ahiruneko is an admitted gari (pickled ginger) maniac. Whenever he goes into a sushi restaurant he’s sure to polish off as much of the pink sweet and sour flakes as he does actual sushi. Yes, for Ahiruneko, sushi just wouldn’t be sushi without gari.
But one day he heard some troubling news. Word had it that Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants in Russia were selling a chicken sandwich topped with gari. “What are the Russians thinking?!” thought our reporter as he set out in search of these mythical creations…
If you’ve gone on a few overseas trips, you may be familiar with the phenomenon of travel poo, wherein your stool takes on a different hue for a few days as you adjust to local ingredients. It’s far less common for the opposite to occur, but that’s what seems to be happening with Burger King’s black burgers, which have become a repeating success story in Japan.
Burger King is currently offering its darkly colored sandwich in the U.S. and the U.K., but many are reporting that while the company turned the burger’s bun black, the burger is turning their poo green. But what’s behind this transformation, and why didn’t it happen in Japan?
In a lot of ways, Japan’s equivalent to the hamburger is the beef bowl, or “gyudon” as the locals call it. Tasty, fortifying, and cheap, beef bowls are so prevalent and popular in Japan that they essentially have their own strata in the personal food pyramids of many college students and bachelors.
Realizing that much of its customers’ bodies are literally made out of beef bowls, Japan’s largest gyudon chain is now embarking on a research project to investigate what happens after three months of eating the dish.
Even if you’re not a fan of McDonald’s burgers, fries, or food offerings of any kind, you have to admit the fast food chain knows how to make a pretty tasty shake. Thick and creamy, sipping on a McDonald’s shake can instantly bring back those feelings of happy contentedness you felt as a child, and in Japan part of the reason might be that the experience is designed to make you feel like a baby sucking down a meal of breast milk.
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