Hachiko Ramen

It’s pink because it’s tantanmen flavour. Supposedly the taste of Akita, home of the Akita dog… well, it wasn’t all that spicy, so it went down fine.

Fried egg flavour potato chips

There was something similar in Korea, but this one seems to be the original. It really does taste of fried egg… If you like a fried egg as a drinking snack, I think you’ll like these chips too.

Premium Baby Cheese, gorgonzola flavour

This one works as a drinking snack too…

Sapporo Shizuoka Bakushu

Maybe because it’s brewed at the Shizuoka plant, it felt that bit fresher.

Choco mint

It’s packed with chocolate, which I think is what makes it good.

Craft Beer That Loves Gyoza

It reminded me of Asahi somehow. That clean, Asahi-ish taste is probably exactly what goes so well with gyoza.

Bacchus

Unlike Rummy, this one is a chocolate with cognac in it, and it’s good. Though it’s hard to top rum raisin.

Menma flavour potato chips

It was just okay.

Salty

A salty baked snack, and quite decent.

Country Ma’am, rum raisin flavour

This one is so-so as well, but perfectly edible.

Super Potato, mustard flavour

This one wasn’t great. For a start, it didn’t really taste of mustard… though there was never much chance it would.

Häagen-Dazs Kanjuku Beni Haruka

A limited-run Häagen-Dazs studded with sweet Beni Haruka sweet potato. When something like this comes out, there’s no way not to buy it…

Amour du Chocolat

They run this event in Hamamatsu too. The scale is small, but chocolate shops you can’t normally see around here, like Sadaharu Aoki, come in for it, so it is a good chance.

Soba

This is off the menu at a soba place inside a department store, and it’s decent. Reasonable food and reasonable service are the virtue of a department store restaurant, I think. You can even charge your iPhone.

Usukawa tsubu-an pan

This is a Yamazaki bun that got a little famous on Twitter: they cut the number of buns per pack and increased the filling instead, so the total weight stayed the same. That meant using less of the flour that had gone up in price, so the skin got even thinner, and apparently that made it taste better. So I bought some and tried it, and it really is good. Honestly, I’m not sure I could tell the difference even against a specialist shop.

All Raisin

Cookies that have been famous this long taste good and come in generous amounts. If it’s a snack you see everywhere in the supermarket… then it’s almost certainly a good one.

Custard Cake

Tastes pretty good… I quite like attempts like this.

Garlic kalpas

I’m Korean myself, but even so this was about as much garlic as I could take packed into a kalpas. It does taste good, of course, but I did wonder whether it needed to go quite this far…

Nodo-ame, plum

This brand puts out a lot of interesting throat drops.

Dolsot bibimbap flavour Cup Noodle

It reproduces the scorched gochujang taste that’s specific to dolsot bibimbap really well. I never expected to taste a flavour in Japan that hasn’t even been attempted in Korea.

Nodo-ame, Shine Muscat flavour

Not great…

Jagarico, burnt caramel flavour

The sweetness isn’t overpowering and the caramel goes well with the potato. Good to eat as a dessert.

Cheese Dessert, crisp Aomori Fuji apple

A cheese dessert with real pieces of apple you can actually bite into. They make these well…

Raisin butter flavour chocolate

Around this time desserts using raisins and rum were pouring out, and since I like that sort of dessert I bought plenty of them — all of them were good above a certain level.

Anchovy garlic flavour cheese

It struck me as a bit salty. Hard to pair with whisky, but it might be fine with wine…

Pistachio butter potato chips

The taste wasn’t anything remarkable… anyway, all sorts of pistachio snacks came out that season, and this one at least covered the basics…

Fuku-mame, the lucky beans

In Japan there’s a custom at the start of the year called Setsubun, where you throw beans to invite in good fortune and drive out the oni. These are the beans for that, and they’re tasty… maybe because they’re so dry they catch in your throat a bit, but they have a nice nutty flavour. Once Setsubun is over the beans go on sale, so if you pick up a few then and work through them slowly, they make a good healthy snack…

Ehomaki

At Setsubun there’s a custom of eating a roll while facing a particular direction. Not that it means anything, but that’s just how it is…

Ichigo-ame

Strawberries dipped in candy — better than it looks. It has plenty of fans.

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