Do 7-Eleven Japan’s new back-to-budget-friendly-basics rice bowls make us happy?【Taste test】

The fight against convenience store price creep heats up.

There’s a price creep problem occurring at Japanese convenience stores. Not too terribly long ago, it was pretty easy to put together a meal that would fill you up for around 500 yen (US$3.40), but nowadays convenience store bento boxed lunches are starting to get closer to 1,000. Trying to stay well under that restaurant lunch-level price threshold is traditionally why a lot of people look for something to eat at convenience stores in the first place, but if you’re going to be paying roughly the same as you would for sit-down service in a restaurant, why bother?

Mercifully, 7-Eleven Japan seems to have become aware of that growing sentiment, and they’re trying to restore their image through their Ureshii Ne, or “Happy Price,” line. Starting with a few varieties of rice balls this past July, the Ureshii Ne lineup consists of simple, long-selling favorites at reduced prices, and as part of the line’s expansion 7-Eleven has just added three more budget-friendly Ureshii Ne rice dishes.

All three of them are priced at 348 yen (US$2.35), which would have been an attractive price even before the purportedly supply chain and currency conversion-triggered consumer price hikes Japan has seen over the past few years. But even if you’re not paying very much, you’re still wasting money if the food tastes bad or the portion is unreasonably small, so we rushed out to try all three of the new Ureshii Ne offerings to see how they felt on our taste buds and in our bellies.

The first of the trio is a fried rice, or chahan, bowl…

…the second is Indian-style butter chicken curry, with white rice underneath…

…and the third is a mabodon, or spicy mapo tofu over rice.

Taste-testing duties fell to our Japanese-language reporter P.K. Sanjun, and he’s happy to report that all three of them taste just like you’d expect of 7-Eleven Japan, which is to say that they’re tasty and high-quality, with satisfyingly strong flavors that don’t try to do anything too clever for their own good. If you’ve ever had any of these dishes in Japan and enjoyed them, it’s a very safe bet that you’ll like the Ureshii Ne versions of them.

Are they enough to fill you up, though? Heading to the SoraNews24 technical testing laboratory, P.K. used some of our precision equipment (a kitchen scale) to determine that the mabodon is the heavyweight of the trio, coming in at 400 grams (14.1 ounces)…

…while the butter chicken weighed 380 grams…

…and the fried rice 327 grams.

That’s actually a pretty big gap, so the mapo tofu and curry are the ones you’ll want to choose if you’re feeling especially hungry.

Having tried them all, P.K. thinks they’ll do a decent job tiding you over in times of moderate appetite, but they might not be quite enough for habitually big eaters or people who’re already close to starving when they walk into 7-Eleven. On the plus side, being in a convenience store means it’s easy to supplement any of these with a rice ball or other small pre-prepared side dish if you’re extra-hungry on that day, and with 7-Eleven planning to add more of those to the Ureshii Ne line in the weeks to come, all three of these rice dishes are making us pretty happy.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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