🍱

Bento Box Emoji 🍱

A compartmentalized box holding rice, a protein, and a few vegetable sides, each kept separate rather than piled together in one mess. It's used for Japanese-style packed lunches and meal-prep photos generally, the emoji equivalent of a meal that's portioned out and ready to grab on the way out the door.

What 🍱 means

A red and black square box with assorted foods such as fish/meat, cooked veggies, rice/noodles, pickles, and eggs (the variety and form of each would definitely vary in every bento box).

The 🍱 Bento Box emoji signifies a typical wholesome Asian meal and the perfect takeaway for one person. It can also suggest traditional Asian gastronomy. and a lunchbox in general as well.

How and when to use it

You can use 🍱 as a cute way of asking someone "What's for lunch?".
🍱 can also signify 'wholesomeness', which can be used in a metaphorical and goofy sense. For instance, "Baby, you know you're my wholesome meal 🍱. You can just make dessert for me 🙂 " (*ugh he sucks at cooking*).
If you're denoting "Lunch" in any context, then too, you can use 🍱 . It signifies both, a filling lunch and the typical idea of 'lunch' (westerners, not biasing against you in any way).
If you're posting or reposting about a food-based podcast, talk show, or even cookery show, 🍱 can be an addition in your post caption.
While sending pictures of your lunch as a response to the third point, you can use 🍱 in the caption (most preferably if your actual lunch somehow looks like the emoji).
Apart from just 'lunch', 🍱 can also be used in the contexts of 'nutrition', 'food', and anything related to 'cooking' as well.

Other Names

🍱 Bento
🍱 Meal Box
🍱 Box Meal
🍱 Lunch
🍱 Box of Food
🍱 Lunchbox
🍱 Luncheon
🍱 Asian Cuisine

The lowdown

Category: Food & Drink › food-asian
Codepoints: U+1F371
Emoji version: Emoji 0.6
Shortcodes: :bento::bento_box: Discord
Keywords: bento, box, food

How it looks across platforms

Seeing a blank box instead of the emoji somewhere? Here's why that happens. Curious why the designs above don't match to begin with? Here's why that happens too.