Konbini Kinyoubi: Caviar Potato Chips

Welcome to Konbini Kinyoubi, where every Friday (Kinyoubi) we visit our local convenience store (Konbini) and buy something delicious. This post contains affiliate links. For more information, please read our affiliate disclosure.

One thing you should already know about me is that I am a fancy boy who enjoys the finer things in life. I’ve written previously about the lengths I’m willing to go in order to obtain a high-end snack, and this week, we tried yet another fancy potato chip. Ladies and gentleman, these are caviar chips.

The bag has French on it, so you know they’re expensive. These were available at Family Mart, and obtaining them was rather straightforward: all I had to do was work for years as a housekeeper in order to land a job at a high-end resort, sneak into Mark Zuckerberg’s penthouse room, tamper with his medicine to ensure he would be passed out for the necessary period of time, use stolen CIA technology to mine his fingerprints and retinal scan information, enlist a crew of A-list hackers and spies to create a lifelike Zuckerberg mask (as lifelike as the Zuck can be) complete with fake fingerprints and contacts matching his retinal scans, gain entry to his secret lair, liquidate all his assets and have the money transferred to an untraceable account (still used regular banks for this because crypto is for suckers), and killed everyone on the team so there would be no one left alive who knew of the mission. Then I spent the money on these chips.

So, how did they taste?

Not to brag, but I’ve got some fancy friends, so I’ve had caviar before. That’s why I can say without any doubt that these did not taste like caviar. They tasted like… something. Something strange. But not caviar.

“This is potato chips,” said Eriko. She hasn’t had fancypants caviar before, but of course has eaten different kinds of fish eggs because Japan. “I don’t feel [caviar],” she added, “but oishii.”

After a few more bites, she continued: “little bit… little bit flavor I can taste.”

She was right. There was some sort of flavor to it, but it wasn’t clear what. It wasn’t really a fishy taste, not necessarily bad, just sort of… there. They weren’t as good as plain chips would have been.

"But I realized,” she said, “I didn't have caviar. I have not eaten caviar, maybe. I'm not sure." I assured her caviar does not taste like these chips. "I feel normal potato chips taste, maybe something different, but I'm not sure it’s caviar," she said.

We concluded our snack with about half the bag left. I thought they were okay, but wasn’t compelled to keep stuffing my face, which is a rarity when it comes to potato chips. Before closing up the bag, we smelled the dust at the bottom - now THAT stuff smelled like fish.

“Yeah, now very strong,” said Eriko.

A couple days later, as I lay in a deep, beautiful slumber, Eriko ate the rest of them.

“Last not so good,” she said. “Smell fish. At first I was hungry so I could eat, but maybe if I’m not hungry, I don’t want to eat. Hungry magic.”

There you have it, folks. If you have hungry magic, you will want to eat these chips. If you are not hungry, you probably won’t like them. I walked into this thinking maybe caviar and chips don’t mix, but I still don’t have an answer to that question because these chips didn’t really taste like caviar or anything we could name. However, this haul gets a 15/10 because I also bought some other stuff at the konbini while I was there and it was all delicious.