Last year the Ippei-chan Yomise no Yakisoba line of instant yakisoba by maker Myojo had a "Choco Sauce" version that was pretty terrible.
The problem was that it simply added chocolate sauce to standard yakisoba sauce and toppings--not a good match. (See RocketNews for another review.)
This year, a different maker, Peyoung, also decided to try their hand at chocolate yakisoba, just in time for Valentine's Day: Peyoung Chocolate Yakisoba Giri. (*Giri means obligatory, a reference to giri chocolate which is chocolate that females give to males on Valentine's Day out of a sense of obligation rather than actual feelings of love/affection--e.g. chocolate female co-workers give to male co-workers.*)
Since neither of us had tried this particular brand of instant yakisoba before, my husband and I decided to eat both the standard Peyoung Sauce Yakisoba (MSRP 170yen) and the Valentine's Day Peyoung Chocolate Yakisoba Giri (MSRP 185ye) for dinner on Valentine's Day.
Surprisingly, the chocolate yakisoba was pretty good once I got over the weirdness of eating sweet noodles. The freeze-dried strawberry pieces and "crouton" (more like rusk) toppings complemented the sauce pretty well, and the sauce itself wasn't excessively sweet. In fact, I probably liked it better than the regular yakisoba, which was too salty for my tastes.
The key difference betweeen the Peyoung chocolate yakisoba this year and last year's Ippei-chan chocolate yakisoba was that the Peyoung yakisoba was yakisoba in name only. Whereas the Ippei-chan version tried to combine regular yakisoba with chocolate sauce, Peyoung's approach was to make a tasty chocolate sauce that just happened to be on yakisoba noodles. As a result, it was surprisingly not bad, and I think it was worth trying.
But I probably wouldn't go out of my way to buy it again.
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