7-11 Tomato Sandwich (product information)

Image from 7-11 Japan.

When I was growing up, my mother used to eat food which I felt was pretty disgusting. The worse was just bread with raw green bell peppers with butter. The second worst was the same sandwich, but using tomato in place of the bell peppers. This sort of one-vegetable sandwich was bad not because of the veggies themselves, but rather because of the shallow flavor profile and the unpleasant textural combinations, especially when you pair cheap soft, gluey white bread with crunchy raw peppers and squishy butter.

This new sandwich from 7-11 seems to be something after my mother's heart, but with a little more sophistication and depth. Those are biggish chunks of tomatoes glued into the sandwich with egg salad mixed with broccoli and carrot. A few reviews that I've read proncounce it "unusual" and "crunchy". I wouldn't exactly call those encouraging words.

Lawson Cold Duck and Pumpkin Sandwich (product information)

I often scoff at the idea that Japan offers exotic flavors that you wouldn't be likely to find anywhere else. Now, I have to eat those words because I'm fairly certain no convenience store in America is going to offer a combination like the one in this Lawson sandwich.

This is throwing in all of the goods in order to create the illusion of an elegant sandwich. I'm sure that it sounds and looks better in the promotions than it appears when it's a plastic-wrapped sandwich in the store, but the concept is pretty high profile nonetheless.

This promises fatty, melt in your mouth duck, Kiri cream cheese, balsamic dressing, orange marmalade, walnuts, and pumpkin. The bits of walnut are artfully studded between slices of pumpkin in the pictured sandwich, but I'm guessing the reality will be a bit more haphazard.

"Konbini" elegance comes at a slightly premium price though. This sandwich costs 290 yen (about $3), which may seem cheap by American standards but you have to remember that sandwiches are a more petite affair in Japan. This will satisfy your average office lady with her diminutive appetite, but is unlikely to do for anyone on the more active or taller side. 

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Pirates of the Caribbean 4 has opened in Japan, and one of my students has gone to see it. She said that she thinks the movies are popular because people seem to like pirates. I think it's because we enjoy seeing Johnny Depp lurch about in eyeliner. The movie's release has spawned more than banal chitchat between my students and me. It has also compelled Yamazaki bakery to release sandwiches that use the movie for promotion. This specimen is a crust-less white bread tuna curry number. I was afraid to try it, lest I find myself wanting to cake on copious amounts of eyeliner and stumble around drunkenly.

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Click on this image for a bigger version in gory detail. 

There are many foods in Japan which are better than what you can get in other countries, and there are some foods which are prepared uniquely to suit Japanese tastes which are different, but still good (not better, not worse, just different). Some things in Japan are pretty  much complete and utter failures, and that is sandwiches. The specimen pictured above is a soba sandwich. Soba is a Japanese noodle made from buckwheat. It is the equivalent of a spaghetti sandwich. There's nothing better than carbs heaped on carbs with, of course, some mustard (karashi) mayonnaise to boot!

While this is one of the nastier looking sandwiches (seriously, don't you think it looks like worms?), there are plenty of nice looking sandwiches with crusts removed that are full of paper thin ham slices, extremely mayo heavy potato, egg or tuna salad (more of a mayo paste with flavoring), and strawberries and cream.

Variety Friday: Domino's Hot Sub Procured

Image pinched from Domino's web site.

In last week's Variety Friday post, I mentioned that my husband and I were planning on giving Domino's new hot subs a try. I had actually planned on adding a bit to the end of that post talking about our experience, but something strange happened on the way to the pizza place.

There's a Domino's about a 3 or 4 minute walk from our apartment. It's a really tiny place with an entryway that is about as big as two phone booths stacked side by side, but there's enough of a kitchen behind it to do what they have to do to serve and deliver pizza to our neighborhood. When we walked down there around 1:00 pm, it was locked up tight. Since it is open 7 days a week, and at lunch time, this was a bit strange. In fact, there was a Japanese man who was clearly lurking outside waiting to see if they opened. After a short wait, he started trying to call the shop on his cell phone to no avail. We gave up pretty quickly and walked away. This is why this is a separate review rather than an addendum to last week's post.

Today, we had better luck around the same time of day and procured our sandwiches. My husband also ordered their rather pricey "juicy fried chicken" (at about $5 (510 yen) for only 4 small pieces) because he wasn't confident that the sandwiches were going to have enough meat to satisfy him. The people who took our order were very nice and energetic and fielded my husband's questions about whether or not mayonnaise (which he dislikes) was on the meat sub. I should note that you have to be very careful about asking such questions in Japan because even raising the point often makes them conclude that you want the food you're asking about. He had to make sure they knew he didn't want mayonnaise because the first thing they assumed was that he was asking to have mayo added to the sandwich. The exchange was something like this:

Husband: Does the meat sub have mayo?
Helpful clerk1: No, it doesn't.
Helpful clerk2: Yes, we have mayonnaise!
Husband: No, no, I don't want mayonnaise, I want to know if you put it on usually.
Helpful clerk2: No, not usually, but we can!
Husband: No, no, I don't want any.

I think this type of response comes from an overzealous desire to please the customer's every wish if it is at all possible.

There are sites which specialize in showing you how food looks on the packaging or in the advertising as compared to the real thing. The outside of our sandwiches really did resemble the ones in the advertisement (pictured at the top of this post), though they were toasted a bit more darkly and had cheese running down them in a few spots.


I ordered the roasted chicken hot sub with the full knowledge that it might not have all that much chicken. I would call the chicken quantity barely adequate. The bread was nice, fresh and crispy and the cheese good and gooey. The chicken was moist and nice white meat. The chicken was smothered in pesto mayonnaise and topped with melted cheese. I've mentioned before that mayonnaise is like the 4th food group in Japan. They love it to pieces, but I certainly could have done with a lot less of this. In fact, mostly, all I could taste was the pesto mayo with glimpses of the chicken.


My husband's meat sub was closer to a pizza sandwich and had more meat although the slices of the three types of meat were pretty thin. On the bottom is pizza sauce then what the Japanese call "pepperoni salami" (which is not the same as pepperoni in the U.S.), then "fresh ham" (not heavily cured), and finally the weird ass Japanese "wieners" that have a funky taste all their own. I didn't sample it, but my husband liked this and said he'd buy it again, even given the somewhat heavy price tag for a 15 cm (6 inch) sandwich.

Strangely, the meat sub was the cheapest of the sandwiches at 550 yen (about $5.50) despite clearly having more meat than the roast chicken which was 680 yen (about $6.75). Usually, meat is the priciest element of any food order here. I guess that they were charging me more for the heaping helping of pesto mayonnaise. At any rate, while I would be willing to try one of these subs again, I won't be giving the roast pesto mayonnaise with a side of chicken a shot again. I'd probably try the jalapeno next time, provided they don't discontinue these before I get around to having another.

Soft Bagel Ham & Cheese

That nice picture of the bagel with lots of gooey cheese around the edge is a big, fat lie.

Most of the time, I shy away from pre-prepared food. It's always disappointing and not very filling. Sandwiches in Japan are particularly underwhelming because they are almost always made with white bread and high fat, low protein fillings. Once every month or two, I'll feel too overwhelmed to go to the trouble of making something decent from the scraps around the apartment and give in to buying some marginally appetizing food in a plastic package. Of course, I feel guilty later for having done so because the packaging is always wasteful.

In the case of the "soft bagel" ham and cheese sandwiches, the packaging isn't too terribly bad as buying three bagels would net me a plastic bag anyway. Buying ham would add in a styrofoam tray and the cheese would add in another plastic bag. So, my guilt is mitigated a bit knowing the components would bring more waste than the end product in this particular case.

These bagels definitely fall under the "snack" category rather than "meal" because they are on the smallish side though they are a heartier snack than most. There are three bagels in a cardboard tray with a moisture absorbing pack in each bag. The moisture absorber must be good because the expiration date on my package was two weeks after the date on which I purchased it. The ham must be cured within an inch of its life to stay "fresh" for so long.

The 3-pack costs about 370 yen ($3.43 USD) so it's 123 yen ($1.14) per bagel. This makes it a cheaper snack than a box of Pocky or some more lavish candy bars. Each is a relatively modest 227 calories. The instructions tell you that you can microwave it for 50 seconds or toast it, but microwaving bread is always a bad idea, so I decided to toast it.

You only need a smattering of cheese, as long as it's smattered in the right place and can fool the consumer.

Though these are made by Nippon Ham, the quanitity of ham is very skimpy. You get one tiny, thin slice which doesn't even cover the entire small bagel. The cheese distribution is shameful. You get a small sprinkling concentrated around the bagel's center to fool you into thinking it's a reasonably cheesy sandwich when you look at the bagels through the clear plastic part of the packaging.

The filling is utterly anemic and I couldn't taste the ham much at all. It was more like a condiment than a component of the sandwich (and a weak one at that). However, the bagel is really very good. When toasted, it's shiny and a tad crispy on the outside and nicely chewy inside. Considering that buying an average plain bagel in Japan costs almost the same as one of these sandwiches, the value isn't bad as long as you're mainly buying it for the bagel itself. I beefed mine up a bit with some more cheese, spread some mayonnaise and coarsely ground mustard on it and added a side of sliced tomatoes and soup for a small meal. The back of the package recommends you add in some avocado and a salad to make it a "California bagel."

I can see myself buying these again when I'm lazy or too tired to mess around. If I were working in an office and wanted to have something to snack on with more heft, I'd definitely consider buying a package of these  to dissuade me from buying sweets or chips.