Obentos' New Winter Menu Fights Off Chills With Hearty Salads and Soupy Bentos

Being the Brit that I am, winter meals at home usually consist of: a potato (mashed/baked/raw?), some meat, and perhaps a sprinkling of veg (for when times get wild), thrown on top of each other and with me bent over it as water droplets echo out around my cold, cavernous dungeon. So you must pardon my disbelief when I discovered that Obentos' new winter offerings distill a similar sense of homely satisfaction from a combination of altogether more salubrious ingredients (and in a much nicer setting).

With double disbelief, the best item on their new seasonal dishes may just be the winter salad (RMB 52), which lacks any semblance of heat but warms you all the same with its crunchy mixture of cabbage, kale, and green beans, topped with crispy shallots and crushed peanuts, tossed in Obentos' habit-forming tofu dressing. Soup it up by adding a portion of grilled chicken. 

Next up, their original poke bowl undergoes a makeover, becoming the seasonal abundance poke (RMB 78) thanks to a generous helping of mixed grains as the base for fresh marinated sashimi salmon, wasabi avocado dip, pickled cucumber and radish, fresh red cabbage, and seaweed topped with a vinegar-based poke dressing. Although the carefully picked textural selection of the ingredients – crunch from the pickled veg and smoothness courtesy of the salmon and mashed avocado – left us to gobble this one up, we couldn't help feeling that the dressing somewhat obscured the freshness of it all. For that reason, we'd suggest the dressing goes on the side so customers can add accordingly.

Past that one bump, it was smooth sailing, with the teriyaki salmon ochazuke bento (RMB 68) acting as the perfect warm-me-up filler. Carefully pour the hot matcha dashi soup over the bountiful bowl of grilled teriyaki salmon, brown rice, and edamame for a combination that will warm your frost-bitten hands back into motion, steam your face back to life, and fill your belly before you clamber back to bed. 

Finally, finish off your meal with what might be one of the healthiest and most guilt-free desserts going: black rice, quinoa, and mango sorbet (RMB 48). Drizzled with a sweet mango coulis, the combination of black rice and quinoa go down a treat and add a warm and sweetened bite to the tart sorbet. Sprinkle it all in chia seeds and you know you can down this without too much fear of entering a premature fat-filled winter hibernation.

In all, these new additions take what Obentos does best – well-rounded and satisfying dishes using the best healthy ingredients to be found in Beijing – and updates the menu with a number of seemingly simple but oh-so-effective chill-alleviating twists.

Photos: Tom Arnstein