🥖 In early July 2026, a mentaiko maker from Fukuoka set up a tasting booth at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. On offer: a baguette stuffed with spicy pollock roe and butter, then toasted. According to the Nikkei, the 3,000 samples it brought were gone in two hours.

In Fukuoka the bread is called mentai France. In the US it will be sold as Tokyo Toast, a nod to Texas toast, because the word "mentaiko" means nothing to most Americans. In Japan, fish roe in bread is nothing unusual. Bakery shelves also carry buns filled with sweet beans, fried noodles and pickled radish.

The Fukuoka Bakery That Made Mentai France a Thing

Mentai France is a long, thin baguette split open, filled with mentaiko worked into butter, and baked. Mentaiko is pollock roe cured with chili and other seasonings, and it is Fukuoka's signature food.

The bakery usually credited with making it popular is Full Full in Fukuoka City, run by a company called Furutapan, which started selling it in 2002. According to local broadcaster RKB, the company's then president, now chairman, tasted a mentaiko baguette on a study trip to the island of Shikoku and decided to make one with Fukuoka's own mentaiko. Shikoku had the bread first; Fukuoka made it famous.

It did not sell at first. An employee suggested cutting slits so it was easier to eat, and it took about three years to catch on, the Nishinippon Shimbun reports. In October 2026 the paper reported that Full Full now sells more than 5,000 a day across four stores in Fukuoka Prefecture. According to PRESIDENT Online, the bread makes up about 40% of sales and costs 463 yen (about 3 dollars) before tax.

Now tourists line up too. On a morning in late September 2026, more than 50 people queued outside the shop in Fukuoka's Tenjin district, many of them speaking foreign languages, according to the Nishinippon Shimbun. Mentaiko makers have piled in. Yamaguchi Aburaya Fukutaro began making its own in 2023 and produced about 180,000 in fiscal 2025, up from about 70,000 two years earlier. Yamaya Communications opened a specialty shop at the entrance to Dazaifu Tenmangu shrine in 2020. Its sales volume rose 1.8 times in the year to August 2026.

Yamaya is the company behind the Dodger Stadium tasting. It is not the same business as Full Full. The Nikkei reports that Yamaya plans to start selling in the US as early as 2027 (as of October 2026).

Mentaiko itself crossed the sea to get here. According to the Fukuoka Prefecture Tourism Association, its roots are on the Korean Peninsula, and "myeongtae" is Korean for Alaska pollock. Toshio Kawahara, founder of the Fukuoka company Fukuya, reworked a flavor he remembered from his childhood in Busan to suit Japanese tastes and began selling it in Nakasu, Hakata, in 1949. He took no patent and taught the method to other businesses, so mentaiko shops multiplied across Fukuoka.

Sweet Beans, Fried Noodles and Pickled Radish in a Bun

Anpan is a soft bun filled with sweet red bean paste. According to Kimuraya Sohonten's website, its predecessor Kimuraya in Tokyo's Ginza started selling it in 1874, and in 1875 it was presented to Emperor Meiji.

Kare pan is curry wrapped in dough and deep-fried. The yoshoku pan made in 1927 by Cattleya, a bakery in Tokyo's Morishita neighborhood then called Meikado, is usually named as the first, though there are other claims.

Yakisoba pan is a hot dog bun stuffed with fried noodles in a sweet-savory sauce. It is carbs inside carbs, and a fixture at school canteens, festival stalls and convenience stores.

Salad pan is the specialty of Tsuruya Pan in Nagahama, Shiga Prefecture. Despite the name, the filling is takuan (pickled daikon radish) mixed with mayonnaise. It started out in 1960 with cabbage and took its current form in 1962. As of a 2023 report, the bakery made about 3,000 a day.

Chikuwa pan traces back to Donguri, a bakery in Sapporo. Chikuwa is a tube of grilled fish paste; the hole is stuffed with tuna salad, wrapped in dough and baked. It reportedly appeared in the 1980s.

Melon pan contains no melon. One leading theory is that the cookie crust, with its crisscross pattern, looks like a muskmelon.

Fruit sando is whipped cream and fruit, such as strawberries, between slices of soft white bread. In June 2025 the British retailer Marks & Spencer launched a strawberry sandwich for 2.80 pounds, saying it was inspired by the Japanese fruit sando.

Pasta and Pizza Got the Same Treatment

Spaghetti Napolitan has nothing to do with Naples. According to the Hotel New Grand in Yokohama, the hotel was requisitioned after the war as quarters for officers of the Allied occupation. The officers ate military ration spaghetti mixed with ketchup, and the hotel's second head chef reworked the ingredients and sauce into a dish of its own.

Tarako spaghetti is pasta tossed with pollock roe. According to Gendai Business, it was born in 1963 at Kabe no Ana, a spaghetti restaurant in Shibuya. A customer brought in caviar and asked to have it on spaghetti, and the kitchen tried tarako as an easier roe to get.

Pizza in Japan can come with mayonnaise, teriyaki chicken and seaweed. In 2013, the English-language Japan news site SoraNews24 ran these under the headline "10 crazy pizzas from Japan."

Western Wrapper, Japanese Filling

According to Kimuraya's website, bread had not caught on in Japan when the bakery was founded around 1869. Taking a hint from sake-flavored steamed buns, it leavened its dough with sakadane, a sake yeast, and filled it with bean paste. It went on making breads for Japanese palates, including jam buns.

After World War II, school lunches made bread part of every child's day. According to nippon.com, in 1950 complete lunches with bread and milk began for 1.27 million elementary school children in eight big cities, including Tokyo, Osaka and Fukuoka. In 1952 the state began paying half the cost of flour, and the lunches spread nationwide. Once bread is everyday food, stuffing it with whatever is in the kitchen, from fried noodles to curry to pickles to fish roe, is a short step.

Foreigners are probably surprised because they assume bread and pasta have a proper way to be eaten. Japan took them in without those rules, which I think is why it has felt free to swap the fillings.

Japanese Bread Heads Overseas

In December 2025, 7-Eleven launched a Japanese-Style Egg Salad Sandwich at participating stores across the US, based on the tamago sando sold in its Japanese stores. It uses fluffy milk bread and Kewpie, a Japanese mayonnaise. In 2022, The Guardian reported that in Los Angeles a loaf of milk bread from the Japanese bakery Ginza Nishikawa cost 18 dollars and sold out within seconds of going on sale online at 8 a.m.

Now mentai France joins them as Tokyo Toast. Bread writer Hiroaki Ikeda told the Nishinippon Shimbun that this Fukuoka-born loaf could become a bread of the world.

What food pairing from your country would surprise a visitor? And which one on this list would you try first? For another Western dish that took its own path in Japan, see why "pasta of desperation" peperoncino became so loved in Japan.

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