While in Japan, I ate a lot at these “vending machine” restaurants. No, your food does not come out from the vending machine. What you do is select your food from the vending machine, pay and then collect the ticket that comes out.
Take it into the restaurant and pass it to the waiter, find a place to sit and wait for your food to be served. I had some relatively inexpensive food this way and one of my favourite was this beef on rice. I love this dish. Its like what they serve at Yoshinoya – braised beef slices with onions served on rice.
Portions were huge as with everything in Japan. It surprised me, I can tell you that. I think this one cost JPY280 for a bowl of rice topped with braised beef and a bowl of miso soup. Perfect on a cold day. I whacked off everything 
Since we couldn’t read Japanese, we jabbed at whatever else took our fancy, which was a set that cost about JPY410.
You get a large bowl of steaming hot rice with beef, a raw egg, a bowl of miso soup filled with seaweed and tofu strips and a bowl of salad. What you do is mix in the raw egg into the rice and stir it all up. The hot rice cooks the egg but not all the way. Not for the faint hearted! We learnt this by watching other diners who were only too happy to show us by way of sign language what we should do.
Needless to say, we scraped the bottom of the bowl
For filling, good, inexpensive food, the vending machine restaurants are the way to go in Tokyo 
Even if its a mistaken order, its still delicious!
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That looks really yummy and I love Yoshinoya’s beef rice bowl! How come Japanese restaurants in KL don’t do the same with the raw egg thingy?
@rinnah – one word – salmonella
Oh my goodness, I loved this when I was living in Japan! Vending machine meals were the cheapest food options (other than cooking), and I did it often. Aww I miss this