Above: Mari faces a menu of Kyoto Station restaurants. We settled on Katsukura, a tonkatsu chain. The first time I ate there, I understood that I had never really eaten tonkatsu before. The roast sesame, ground at the table to mix with the sauce (not the one from the brown bottle), yuzu-dressing on fresh chopped cabbage, and crisp-crunchy + tender-juicy tonkatsu. Café Peace makes an excellent case for vegan-ism and preserving animal life, but Katsukura demonstrates how tasty those little piggies can be.
Comments
4 responses to “what to eat?”
There is something rather thrilling about those Japanese menu walls…
Now I’m craving that *real* tonkatsu with the fresh ground sesame, the kind I’ll never get in Toronto!
A menu with photos is always fun. And a giant menu is cool. And since these are all restaurants, in a way it’s a menu of menus. Many pictures, many menus, make it very large — a winning formula.
My old roommate in S.F. made tonkatsu at home one night (before my epiphany at Katsukura). It looked like a lot of work, the sauce was by Kagome, and I don’t think we even had sesame, but the meal did have a homemade magic I’d never found in restaurant tonkatsu. We couldn’t stop eating.
Have you tried making tonkatsu at home?
I make katsudon at home 🙂
And… if I may say so… it’s better than the katsudon that they serve in Japantown (San Francisco).
I don’t roast and grind any sesame seeds, but I do use some sesame oil in the sauteed vegetables. Makes everything smell so goood.
Ooo, yumm. Sounds like I’ll have to invite myself over.