Customer Reviews

501 Bento Lunches: 501 Unique Recipes for Brilliant Bento

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Before I start my review, I'd like to mention that I'm one of the contributors for this book.

That being said, I am not happy at all with the way the book turned out. I was approached by the publisher and was so excited to be published that I didn't think through things carefully. When I sent my images in, I believe I stated that all of them had been touched up with Photoshop for my blog. When they were published, however, they were published as is.

When I first started my bento blog I knew absolutely nothing about lighting. I took my photos in my kitchen with a point and shoot while standing over my bento blocking the light. I had hoped that a book publisher would recognize that the second they looked at the images, so I don't know if they had a new graphic artist or they simply didn't have the time to touch them all up, but my dark and sometimes blurry photos are now printed on paper for the world to see.

Don't be fooled by the title, there are very few recipes in here. The "recipes" are actually instructions for putting the bento together, which are useful, but probably not what people were imagining. The format of the instructions is very compacted and difficult to read. If there is a recipe in there, it's very difficult to find because the ingredients list is all in one paragraph instead of a list.

Since these were obtained with permission from bento bloggers, you can find all of these online. It makes a decent coffee book due to its volume, but as other people mention, it's physical size is very small. The cover is bright and inviting, but the images inside are completely different.

After waiting months for the arrival of this book, I am sorely disappointed.
It has ideas for bentos, not recipes.
It's well organised, but the format is difficult, the text is miniscule, the photos are hard to parse.

My hope and expectation was for a book which dealt with cooking the small amounts appropriate to single servings, and for good pairings of items for meals.
What you get is a tight, cluttered list of ingredients, a dense set of basic instruction, and a photograph of the hoped-for result.

It's fine for experienced bento-makers who want more ideas, but for those of us who have a passing interest and a taste for home-style Japanese food, it's a bit of a clunker.

I seem to be in the minority, but I really like this book and I'm happy I purchased it. I am a very visual person and the bright gorgeous pictures provided a lot of inspiration to me to begin creating my own bento works of art. There are recipes and instructions so you can duplicate any of the orginial creations. I'm going to start creating my own when I go back to work in the fall. Maybe this book is more for beginners rather than those with a lot of experience at this art. I found it to be a lot fun and really inspiring.

Ya know, I was hoping for some good recipes and combination ideas. But instead I got an elementary school kids food-art project book.

That's right, this is a food-art book for kids. Not a recipe book. Now if you are into making some nauseatingly cute lunches then you NEED this book! If you are looking for creative recipes that work in bento boxes? Save your money, this book has nothing to offer you at all.

This is a little book, about 7 inches square. It does have 501 bentos in it, squeezed in with tiny tiny text that is hard on the eyes and abbreviated recipes (each bento gets about 1 x 2 inches of space!) If you have seen the book called Face Food, this is comparable to that, with a lot more bentos and rudimentary recipes. The photo quality...well let's just say that it look like they just used the photos submitted by the bento creators that were on their web pages, and not optimized for print at all. Some photos (even on the cover!) are pixelated, some have poor contrast, and so on.

As for the content, there is a heavy emphasis on the cute and visual school of bentos. The tone is set by the introductory chapter, written by someone who likes to use food dye to color her rice a really bright blue. Perhaps you will like the creativity. It does not look at all appetizing to me.

The bentos are all taken from bento bloggers (and not individually credited, which is a shame, though there's a listing of contributors in the back) so you can use it as a guide to finding those blogs, where you are likely to get much more detailed recipes and instructions.

In summary, if you want a compact picture book of bentos with interesting profiles of the creators, but no recipes, get Face Food. If you want a compact picture book with hard to read or use recipes and no background on the bentos or their creators, get this one. Neither one is a good cookbook or instructional for bento boxes, but this one just feels like a slapped together rush job.

I first know about this book from various bento bloggers across the internet bento community, found on Livejournal mostly, and then on Flickr. This book is a mix up of some of the more well known bento bloggers, and some of the not-so well known ones, which is not a big deal.

In buying this book, I was hoping for good pictorial ideas in laying out my bentos, as well as more suggestions, much like some of the Japanese bento books that were published (sections on actual bentos, what goes in them and recipes for the main stuff in them. then a seperate section on "fillers" on the side). And of course, I constantly buy recipe books and foodie books for the sake of the photography on them.

On those aspects, I was mostly disappointed. While it did fulfil my need for ideas, which can also be easily quenched online, the photography was a sad failure. I have seen some of the photos online before, and expected the book to at least replicate the quality of the pictures. what turned out was darker, sometimes murkier, than the original photos on the internet.

The recipes were almost non-existent. what is there is a bare, rushed "how to throw this together" type of instructions that is no more than 30 words or so on an average. and sometimes, not even that.

While sections were divided up into cute bentos, pictorial bentos, etc, there really isn't much difference between one section to the other.

yes, there is 501 bentos in there I believe, but I think I get more out of surfing the internet and copying and pasting them into word documents than having this book.

I bought this as a gift, then had trouble giving it up. And I don't even care much for many of these foods !

This book is a tiny gem, with every dish a work of art. If you like to cook, especially if you are a fan of Asian cooking, particularly Bento style, BUY THIS BOOK.

I was so excited to get this after the publication date was pushed back several times. I follow many bento sites and blogs, and contribute to some, and was kinda disappointed to see pics of boxes that I have mostly seen before. not true of all, and the author (I say that loosely, as there is no actual text - maybe compiler is better) did a good job of picking out some of the more amazing American bento artists out there. I really would have liked to see more text - interviews with the artists, information about the art of bento. Was looking forward to more recipes, cooking techniques, or a gadget section (granted, a small section in the beginning of the book, but even most of that has been published before on blogs). Kind of a bento fan yearbook, but not what I was hoping for. What that means is.. that there is room for that, in case anybody is looking to write a book! The market is clearly there!

This book is definately a valuable find for those interested in creating unique and dazzling obento, but sadly in lacks a lot of traditional cooking. There are very few recipes that feature true Japanese ingrediants, which I found disappointing. I love making bento for myself and my family but I prefer traditional Japanese. Sadly, this book does not deliver. If you are searching for authentic Japanese bento recipies, look elsewhere.

First, be aware that this is not a book for beginners. If you have a fair bit of general kitchen skill and have already had some bento experience then this book is quite nice to flip through to get inspiration. There are a few hints here and there but very little in the way of direction for actually preparing the food in question. The size of the book is also a bit annoying. I would have preferred that the publishers had cut down the number of recipes per page and increased the page size while they were at it. If that meant cutting some of the recipes then getting rid of quite a lot of the more 'cutesy' type bento arrangements wouldn't have disappointed me at all.