Ekibenya Matsuri

I was super excited to visit this place and knew that I needed the octopus bento jar in my life. The location is hard to find — it’s in the JR station but before you go brought the gates for the Shinkansen. Thankfully the guy at the gates let me leave again to go back to get my bento!
The selection is huge. I didn’t see much English signage so it’s a matter of looking at the pictures and guessing. I got three bento: octopus jar, hot beef and another one with a selection. All up it cost about ¥3000 (£18) so good value for lunch. You can also buy beer, wine, soft drinks. This place gets crazy busy so allow time for browsing and waiting in line to pay. But it’s worth it!
The octopus jar was delicious. A lovely ceramic pot with rice, veggies and pieces of octopus on top. The chopsticks it came with were cute too as they were retractable ones I hadn’t seen before. Graeme’s hot bento was great — you pull out the yellow string and wait 5 minutes and it heats up your food. I don’t know how. Wait until everyone is seated to do it though as we had to pick it up to move it to let someone into their seat and it was super hot!
Everyone on the Shinkansen has bento boxes so make sure you get one otherwise you’ll feel left out. They didn’t seem to be selling bento on the train so I was super glad we came here.
Note; the sign for the shop isn’t in English so thanks to Unilocal for the photos otherwise I’d never have found it!

This specialty store focuses on the Japanese culture item called «Ekiben» which means train (Eki) boxed lunch (bento).
They have all sorts of high end 1,000 — 2,000 yen bentos and some of them heat themselves.
I got the beef tongue steak bento with the self heater. All you do with the self heater is pull the string out and wait six minutes. A heating tab reheats and bam, you have a hot lunch on the bullet train.
They have tons of options from beef to seafood to vegetarian. If you don’t feel like rice they have sandwiches and other options.
This shop also has drinks, water to small portable wine. So before you go on your bullet train trip hit up an Ekiben!