Cruise Inn

Rating: Nasty
Meal:  Breakfast
Price:  350 yen
Payment:  Cash Only (accepts dollars primarily)
Dishes: Spam Musubi
English Menu:Yes

Smoking: No

 The Cruise Inn is the first of my on-base restaurant reviews.  This is a small little spot specializing in breakfast and lunch fast food.  Like most of what's available on base, the ingredients are quite sub-par, so no matter how good it may look on the menu, the food always leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  The best thing about the Cruise Inn is that they offer breakfast and it's on the walk in.  However, not much on the menus is actually very appetizing, so I rarely ever eat here.  For lunch it would have to be a special set of circumstances to convince me to eat their burgers ever again.

The most interesting thing they have in morning is the spam musubi.  I believe this is a Hawaiian/Japanese fusion of onigiri (japanese rice ball) and spam.  The Cruise Inn improves on this by adding some scrambled egg to layers.  I went one better today and ordered a side of cheese!  The theory is excellent, but unfortunately due to poor quality ingredients, the actual result is barely tolerable.  Spam is spam, so nothing to be done there, but the rice is (like all rice on base) of inferior quality and it comes through in taste and texture.  Also, it's not quite sticky enough to hold together properly so it crumbles as you eat it.  The egg is another problem...I don't know what they use, but I would suspect it's the egg powder or liquid, which is nasty stuff.  Even if they are using real eggs, they do use some kind of PAM or synthetic lubricant for oil and everything they cook on the griddle has an off taste as a result.  And then there's the cheese.  Even though the commisary is one of the only places you can get real cheese in Japan (Costco sells it), none of the restaurants on base seem to use it.  The only thing you can get is heavily processed cheese substances, and it is no different here.  I laughed out loud when I was asked "what kind of cheese" I wanted, since it's all just s lightly different color of the same extruded goop.  Oh well...I hauled it back to my desk and ate it for science.