It is one thing to see your friend lose 20 kg, and it is yet another to see her open a new Bento Bar – Lean Bento – concept to help others achieve what she has 🙂

First off, I love Lean Bento’s clean and simple Japanese-inspired design which stands out among the shops in the arcade. It is a great use of space to be able to accommodate the CBD lunch crowd!

While still maintaining the 500 calories per meal philosophy, using responsibly sourced, pesticide-free and clean ingredients, owners Charles Ng and Dionis Chiua have, after many months of research and experimentation, developed a variety of new tastes, textures and flavors.

Being a vegan, I was so glad to hear that Lean Bento serves the Protein Garden ($12.90) – an ultra-low-calorie bento featuring shitake and shimeji mushrooms, sweet baby corn, edamame and chickpea salad, capsicum, wakame salad, cherry tomatoes, multigrain nigiri and home-made shoyu zero-carb shirataki noodles. The meal didn’t fill me up like our regular meal with high carbs but it kept me full for long because of the high fibre content. My favourite part of this bento is the shirataki noodles imported from the US.. the texture is totally like noodles! I can’t wait for Lean Bento to start to retail these shirataki noodles so I have a guilt free noodle option! 🙂

My husband also tried the Marinara Chicken Noodles ($13.90) and Salmon Belly Special ($14.90).

And of course, we must always end the meal with desserts – healthy guilt free ones at that! Lean Bento serves soft and fluffy gluten-free muffins ($4.90) with dark belgian chocolate chip. Its high quality vegetable based protein with no added sugar. There are 3 flavours – Dark Choco Chip, Banana Chocolate (my personal favourite!) and Almond Raisin. *PS: not suitable for vegans as the muffins contain eggs.

I shall end off this review with Dionis inspirtion personal sharing on her motivation behind Lean Bento. I am so proud of not just how you have improved, but how you want to help others to do the same 🙂

“It was mostly because we were trying to look for healthy and clean food outside but it was so difficult. Everything else seems to be very highly processed, had a lot of additives to their sauces and we were always at a loss at what to order apart from salads. We then decided to start Lean Bento, to fix up our own dream food. High protein, calorie controlled portion sizes, clean and wholesome ingredients but yet still yummy at the same time.

Both of us had weight issues for a long time, I personally lost around 20kgs since my peak weight, just by eating right for once. It is actually not that difficult with the right portions and nutrition. This is also one of my motivations for Lean Bento, to help people eat properly easily, stay lean and not have to feel guilty about their meals.

I do the calculations and designing of the amount of ingredients that goes to each bento while Charles (an avid home cook and Peranakan, who is very good with spices and flavours) does a great job of making these ingredients taste good together :)” — Ms Dionis Chiua, Co-founder, Lean Bento

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Lean Bento @ The Arcade

Address: 11 Collyer Quay #02-02 The Arcade, Singapore 049317
Hours: Monday-Friday, 11am-530pm
For delivery, please order at least 1 working day in advance. (P) +654698033