bento geek

"smile smile bento" (650yen)

I've walked by this dirty old bento place my house for years, the kitchen was clearly not clean from the sidewalk. And added to that, I never saw any customers. So I never bothered to stop and try it out. Tonight, I thought "What the heck, let's try it." and maybe because I was standing around waiting for the old lady to make my bento (Japanese people like lines) or maybe because of random happenstance, but the line grew to about 4 or 5 people. I was actually happily surprised by this bento (and this is an actual picture of it too, not just from my phone since I am home right now). It had a nice random burst of flavors. In the upper right various fried meats (all lucious) below those was a cleverly named packaged of sauce (labeled sauce) for the meat, and below that some pickled side dishes and a kind of potato salad-ih thing. Next to that was the simple rice (the blandest thing of the whole lot) and above the rice were various veggies such as string beans, boiled daikon, and soft egg plant. Not a bad deal, I'm going to be back for sure.