Greedy Fruits Omelet & Friends
Rusty's Electric Dreams :: (Big in Japan)
Hey, it’s Rusty, I went to Japan and now I'm aching to write about Japan. So, I will be sharing my observations on their quirky, cool, and kawaii culture as a gaijin (essentially a "gringo") in (Big in Japan), a sub-Substack of my main inbox zine, Rusty’s Electric Dreams. (Don’t worry, that’s not going anywhere.)
This one is NOT about Japanese toilets
Move over, Fluffernutters. As a devoted Marshmallow Fluff superfan, I don’t say this lightly. There’s a new sandwich in town, and dare I say, it might just be better.
Before I went to Japan, I’d heard a lot of chatter about the tasty egg salad “sandos” at the konbinis (Japanese convenience stores like 7-Eleven and Family Mart—LOTS more about these in another issue). Since I’m not a mayo fan, I didn’t pay much attention to the hype.
But I’d never heard about fruit sandos or their fruitless friend, the whipped cream sando, until we were exploring the Family Mart prepared food section and SJ pointed them out to me, stopping me in my tracks.
What is it? Imagine thin, impossibly soft, crustless white bread (known as “milk bread”) filled with a mix of not-too-sweet whipped cream and mascarpone cheese. The sandwich is sliced diagonally and decorated on its edges with small pieces of cut fruit like strawberries and kiwis. Or, as mentioned, it doesn’t have any fruit at all. Both absolutely delicious but no match for the…
Greedy Fruits Omelet aka よくばりフルーツのオムレット
The name alone!
We ended up scoring Ghibli Museum tickets which are notoriously difficult to snag (I’ll get to this in a future issue). The important part is that our reservation was at 4 p.m., so by the time we got there we had already done a lot of sightseeing, mostly by foot, and were a bit peckish. So we started at the musuem’s cafe.
That’s when I saw it.
It’s different than the fruit sando, I know. It’s a single piece of bread. Not as white, not crustless. But the whipped cream mixture and fruit lead me to believe this is a cousin of the fruit sando.
But, why are the fruits “greedy” and why is it considered an “omelet”? No, really, can someone tell me?
By the time we got to Tokyo Disneyland at the end of our two-week trip, I thought I had tried every player in the entire whipped cream sandwich universe. Turns out, our hotel had a curveball waiting for us.
That’s where we stumbled upon yet another variation at our hotel’s 24-hour, impossibly bright convenience store. Since it was inside a pretty decent hotel, I’m not sure the store technically qualifies as a “konbini” but it definitely had the vibes. This sandwich was like a love child of the fruit sando and the Greedy Fruits Omelet. It was a round, crusted bread pocket stuffed with the signature whipped cream mixture and a whole piece of fruit, in this case, an entire banana. Sadly, I neglected to photograph this one but it was delicious and felt like a healthier option somehow.
However, I did photograph this one. To get into Tokyo Disney parks and secure the necessary passes to avoid long lines inside, you need to line up outside the gates hours before they open. After we staked out our spot, I held our place while SJ popped into the nearby Tokyo Disneyland Hotel to forage for breakfast. That’s where she picked this up for me. For a brief moment, I thought it was called a “Yamazaki” because that’s what it reads on the package, but I’m pretty sure that’s just the brand. This one had strawberries gently nestled in the cream and was wrapped in what I’d say is the most “omelet-like” exterior of the bunch.
Which leads me to believe this is no mere fruit sando, my friends. This is a Greedy Fruits Omelet.
Couple more to share. It’s pretty standard fruit sando fare, but it comes with a great rabbit logo. Look at that little guy picking berries for our sando-eating pleasure.
And this one deserves an honorable mention for no other reason than it was found in a Shinkansen (bullet train) station store.
What started as a simple curiosity about fruit sandos turned into a full-blown quest. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: Japan takes its whipped cream very seriously. And now so do I. The Greedy Fruits Omelet and its sando friends have officially won me over. Sorry not sorry, Fluffernutter.
— Rusty Blazenhoff
“This one is NOT about Japanese toilets”, yet all food leads to one.😉
Hmmm I can’t tell you *why* it’s greedy, but the Japanese text does indeed say “greedy fruits omelet” where the word for greedy is “yokubari”.
The one from Tokyo Disneyland says “strawberry crepe” ☺️ yum!