The “Sea Urchin, Sea Urchin, and Sea Clam Aji-Kurabe Bento” purchased at Shin-Hakodate-Hokuto Station is an ekiben bento produced by Yoshidaya, a long-established bento shop in Hachinohe City, Aomori Prefecture. The most impressive feature of this lunch box, which has a slightly extravagant name, is that you can enjoy three types of sea urchin dishes at once: sea urchin in tomato cream sauce, sea urchin with ankake and salmon roe, and sea urchin with sukiyaki-flavored egg and egg.
The first dish, Sea Urchin in Tomato Cream Sauce, has a strong tomato flavor and a slightly subdued sea urchin taste. The first dish is a slightly Western-style sea urchin dish.
The second is “Sea Urchin with Ankake Ikura (salmon roe)”. This dish has a strong sea urchin flavor and goes well with salmon roe marinated in soy sauce, making the sea urchin the star of the dish. The accompanying shiitake mushroom stew is sweet, and the pickled spicy nozawana greens are easy to eat.
The third dish, “Sea Urchin with Sukiyaki-flavored Egg,” has a strong flavor of thick, Japanese-style egg and less sea urchin, and the second and third are served on top of the same soy-sauce-flavored rice as the first.
The assortment of three different types of dishes using sea urchin and a wide variety of flavors is the main attraction of this bento. The combination of the three different types of dishes with sea urchin is a great attraction with a wide variety of flavors, and is therefore slightly different from the seafood bento combined with vinegared rice often found in ekiben in Hokkaido. Incidentally, the “Sea Urchin, Sea Urchin, and Sea Clam Aji Kurabe Bento” won the Gold Award in the Ekiben/Kuuben category of the Japan Food Journal’s Prepared Food and Bento Grand Prix 2018, and is said to be the most popular bento at BENTO CAFE 41°GARDEN in Shin-Hakodate Hokuto Station, where we purchased this time (as of June 2022). (As of June 2022).
BENTO CAFE 41°GARDEN offers a wide variety of drinks, from coffee and juice to alcohol, as well as station lunches with a theme of southern Hokkaido. It may be a good idea to eat your lunch here as a stopover before heading to your next destination.
© Source travel watch