Conbini food review: Soba noodle hotdog

It’s been a while since the last Conbini food review. Around six months in fact. I made a conscious effort to try and improve my diet, and bank balance, that led to buying far less convenience store food. However, I’ve been feeling the itch to get back into the habit of eating over-processed junk. And this time we’re really trying to push the boat out and try some of the most eye-catching, eye-brow raising, potentially stomach-turning convenience store products Japan has to offer. First up: the Soba noodle hotdog.

I first laid eyes on the Soba noodle hotdog a couple of years ago and recoiled violently at the sight before me. A short hotdog bun, packed with glossy brown noodles, in the room temperature bakery section of a 7-Eleven. I mentally dismissed the idea of ever eating such a thing almost immediately. And as the years have gone by in this country, I have resisted the urge to try it – mainly because such an urge has never existed. But in an episode of late night noodle insanity, I bought one.

Now, don’t jump to conclusions about this by how unappetising it looks in photos. Trust me; it looks a lot worse in person. The first thing I noticed after opening the packaging was the strong smell. An early sign of a strong and powerful flavour. The second thing I noticed was that there were no instructions on the packaging relating to how to heat the hotdog up. This was a surefire sign that the geniuses in the 7-Eleven Hotdog Development Lab had decided that this noodle filled bun was to be enjoyed cold.

No offence to HDL team, but they got this one really wrong. The brioche style bun was cold and sticky in the worst ways. It was dense and tough to chew through. The cold Soba noodles were all stuck together and mushy in the mouth. The slight sprinkle of seaweed on top of the noodles was just a congealed green goo. The flavour, sickly and sweet, stuck to the tongue. Just one bite was hard to swallow.

In an effort to rescue this review and salvage some positive points about this horrible hotdog, I place it in my toaster. After a couple of minutes I tried the heated up version of the hotdog. And, well…

It was worse. Whatever made the outside of the bun sticky became hard. The mushy texture of the noodles, the overly soft paste they became in the mouth got even more terrible. It became obvious that there would simply be no redeeming this. It was destined to fail. The whole concept of it is just wrong and weird. The world has no time for this kind of thing when there are far more important things going on, like whether a hotdog is a sandwich (it isn’t, obviously, but it predates the sandwich by centuries, from when The 13th Baron Hotdog invented it in 1569. If he saw this Japanese 7-Eleven Soba noodle hotdog he’d be rolling in his grave, like a…Soba noodle.)

Rating: in the bin.