Nissin Cup Noodle Instant Rice Beef Bowl / Mystery Meat Celebration Review

Beef bowl or gyudon is one of those super tasty Japanese comfort foods that sells at beef bowl restaurants in Japan for a reasonable price.  Beef bowl simmers thin strips of beef in a savory and sweet sauce that is made using mirin, soy sauce, dashi, sake, and onion.  Nissin makes instant rice as part of their Cup Noodle brand and sells a variety of instant rice cups.  Some of the flavours are curry, original, and now they have beef bowl.  I actually make beef bowl at home as it is one of those dishes that Japanese restaurants over here almost never have on their menu, and the recipe is here.

The Mystery Meat Celebration Beef Rice Bowl I'm reviewing here is a limited edition product that was release in 2021, but I've been a little slow reviewing things.  While this is no longer available, Nissin usually has a rice beef bowl of some sort available, and at the time of writing it was a Cup Noodle Mysterious Meat Kimchi Beef Bowl.  These rice cups are about as filling as a regular noodle cup and if you're starving, you'll easily eat two.

3/4 view of the rice and beef cup.  These are squatter cups than the regular Cup Noodle.  It comes with an umami beef sauce packet to give it a real beef bowl kick.

The cup has the classic Cup Noodle branding with a red logo on a white background and the twin lines of vertical gold dashes around the top of the cup.

The lid of the cup.  It shows some plump looking rice coated in savoury sauce with cubes of minced beef and green onion on top.  It looks really tasty.  The black Kanji characters highlighted in orange kind of remind me a bit of the Yoshinoya beef bowl chain colours.  The Kanji says "Mysterious Meat Beef" and the smaller characters read "bowl of sweet and spicy soup beef bowl flavour".  The mysterious meat reference is joke about their regular ground meat cubes which use pork.

A full picture of the front of the cup.  Nice looking beef bowl pictured.

These limited edition, celebration bowls often have neat little cartoons on the left and right side of the front of the cup.

More cartoons on the right side of the cup.  It says the rice is ready in 5 minutes.

Closeup of some of the cartoon characters celebrating by carrying around the little cubes of mince beef.  You have people dressed up as Mexican wrestlers, hipsters, the rice grain mascots, punkers, etc.  I guess all these people like rice bowl!  It is a big street party.

More characters towing around giant beef cubes like sacred shrine objects.  Its pretty fun to look through all the images to see what you spot.

Preparation directions at the top for preparing the rice in 5 easy steps.  Below is ingredients and manufacturing information.

It says the beef floats in the boiling water in the red box.  Underneath is allergen information, nutritional information and warning information about preparation.  There is 11.1 grams of fat in this.

Peeling back the lid a bit reveals a nice amount of beef cubes and some dehydrated short grain rice.

Closeup of the rice and meat.

The prepared rice after re-hydrating in boiling water for 5 minutes.  You add water up to the fill line on the inside of the cup, close the lid, and let it sit.

After the rice had re-hydrated I added in the umami beef sauce and mixed everything together well.  There was a nice savoury, slightly beefy aroma coming off the rice and it smelled pretty good.  The rice absorbed most of the water so it was not soupy and the sauce coated the rice with a nice sheen.  My first bite of the rice didn't disappoint.  It had definite beef bowl flavours as it was beefy, savoury, sweet, and a little spicy.  The meat cubes were a nice little touch to the firm, but not mushy rice.  I polished it off pretty quick and it was a nice little snack.  I like the curry rice cups too, but this is pretty good.  They would make nice little additions to any food larder or camping trip along with regular Cup Noodles!

Closeup of a meat cube and rice.

Follow me on Twitter a @Tostzilla or my feedburner.
More cup noodle / instant ramen reviews and Japanese pop culture.