Sunday bento brunch!

On Sunday morning, we had a shinkansen to catch to Kyoto. We decided we could just pick up some food in Tokyo station (which is huge and has lots of shops and food outlets) to eat during the 3-hour journey. One of the stalls with lots of bento boxes inside the shinkansen gated area caught my eye, I thought maybe there should be some inari sushi or something non-meat/fish there. We were inspecting all the boxes on offer for a bit, and the middle-age lady behind the counter said 'vegetables' and pointed to this box (やさいたっぷり幕の内).

She either a) read our minds and figured we were looking for vegetarian food, or b) assumed that as foreign tourists we were trying to find something that didn't have too much weird fish/seafood/meat. Whatever reason she had, that was incredibly helpful! We swiftly paid ¥1000 each for our takeaway brunch and headed up to the platform.

These vegetable boxes were promoted as 'healthy bento' that:

- includes more than 20 items

- used over 120g of vegetables

- oil used has 0 cholestrol

- no artificial colouring

- used 100% special A grade Japanese rice

- 560 kcal, weight 3.7g

Upon opening the packaging, we found that the healthy meal also looked pretty tasty as well!

The various vegetables (lotus root, green beans, carrot, mushroom, etc.) were all quite nice and tasted reasonably fresh, and the two different types of rice rolls were quite yummy too. The meal also came with some apricot, (sweet) black beans and some kind of pickled plum. As far as pre-packaged meal goes, I'd say this was pretty attractive and nice (and healthy of course!). I guess it goes without saying, probably better than your average station food in the UK!

According to the JR Central Passengers website (which we found after our trip), you can get this vegetable bento at station shops at Tokyo, Shinagawa, Shin Yokohama, Nagoya, Kyoto, and Shin Osaka stations and inside the Tokaido Highway Shinkansen. Good to know that the veggie box is so widely available!

We also discovered that there is a even a web service for pre-ordering your bento & drinks up to 3 days before your journey and to be picked up at Tokyo station at your specified time (though you probably need to be able to navigate the Japanese website and have a Japanese credit card) - talk about customer service and efficiency! http://www.obento-jrcp.jp/