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Yoshinoya’s new Super-Special-Large Bowl: A gigantic three-animal 1,700-calorie fest【Taste test】

Casey Baseel May 2, 2020
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Three meals at once sounds like a perfect lunch to us.

So here are two commonly known things about food in Japan: portions are small, and Yoshinoya makes beef bowls. Pretty indisputable facts, right?

Well, not entirely. While a standard-size menu item in Japan will usually be smaller than its counterpart in the West, many Japanese restaurants allow you to order all sorts of things in extra-large sizes, called omori or tokumori. And while Yoshinoya is best known for its beef bowls, it offers other meaty toppings as well.

So this brings us, and our stomachs, to Yoshinoya’s newest menu item: the Stamina Chotokumori-don, or “Stamina Super-Special-Large Bowl,” a tempting triumvirate of three kinds of meat.

The Stamina Super-Special-Large Bowl boasts chicken, pork, and beef (kalbi short rib, specifically), plus chopped green onion and, if you want one, a raw egg. Everything is also heavily seasoned with garlic, in keeping with Japan’s belief that the pungent vegetable provides extra energy to those who eat it.

“There’s no way this will leave you unsatisfied,” boasts Yoshinoya in its poster for the Stamina Super-Special-Large Bowl, and we decided to see if they were as good as their word by picking one up to try for ourselves.

However, Yoshinoya isn’t just confident in the SSSL Bowl’s flavor and variety, but in its filling factor as well. The tri-meat tram-up packs an astounding 1,700 calories, over three times as many as a standard beef bowl’s 478. The SSSL Bowl itself is also startlingly heavy. Again, for comparison a normal Yoshinoya beef bowl weighs 360 grams (12.7 ounces) (including the takeout container). But when we tried to weigh the SSSL Bowl…

…it spun our kitchen scale’s needle all the way around to 600 grams (1.3 pounds), the maximum amount displayable, meaning it actually weighs even a little more than that.

Taste-testing duties had fallen to our Japanese-language reporter Yuichiro Wassai, so he grabbed his chopsticks, broke the egg yolk, and gave it a stir into the rice, where the heat of the grains flash-cooked it. Lifting a mouthful of gooey rice, egg, garlic, meat, and kimchi (another topping he’d added) to his mouth, he took a bite…

…and it was everything he could have hoped for. Intensely flavorful, the SSSL Bowl’s three different types of meat allow to you to rotate from one to the next again and again, with the circuit keeping your taste buds powerfully engaged throughout the meal.

Of course, with 1,700 calories, many people won’t finish the SSSL Bowl in a single sitting. Yuichiro, however, was up to the challenge.

There’s one more startling number to talk about with the SSSL Bowl: the price. At 798 yen (US$7.45) it’s a bit on the pricey side for a fast food meal in Japan, but when you consider that it’s essentially three meals in one, both in terms of volume and variety, it’s a bargain, and, in Yuichiro’s opinion, just about the most delicious thing Yoshinoya has ever offered.

Note: The Stamina Super-Special-Large Bowl is available at most, but not all, Yoshinoya locations. A list of non-participating branches can be found here.

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[ Read in Japanese ]