How we score
Five parts, 100 points, the same for every shop. Price is left out, and getting in is recorded separately as facts.
- Pork30
- Frying25
- Breading15
- Seasoning10
- Set meal20
Tonkatsu Guide exists to answer one question: of the shops you can actually get into, which is the best? That takes two things. A score, so shops can be compared. And a record of how we got in, so you know whether you can.
The score
Each shop gets a score out of 100. The score is the sum of five parts, and the parts are the same for every shop.
| Part | Points | What we look at |
|---|---|---|
| Pork | 30 | Breed or brand, the cut, thickness, how far it is cooked through, the quality of the fat |
| Frying | 25 | The oil (lard, vegetable oil, or a blend), low or high temperature, how well the oil drains, how long it takes |
| Breading | 15 | The type and coarseness of the panko, colour, whether it stays on the meat, how it holds up by the last piece |
| Seasoning | 10 | Sauce, salt, mustard and anything else on the table, and how the shop suggests you eat it |
| Set meal | 20 | Rice, cabbage, soup, pickles, and whether refills are offered |
Pork and frying make up 55 of the 100 points, because those two decide whether a cutlet is good.
What the score leaves out
Price. We do not score value. A 1,500-yen lunch and a 6,000-yen dinner are measured on the same scale, and each review states what we ordered and what we paid.
Getting in. How hard a shop is to enter has nothing to do with how the food tastes, so it is not in the score. We record it beside the score instead, as two sets of facts.
Getting in: what we record
How the shop takes customers. Walk in, queue at the door, sign a waiting list or take a numbered ticket, buy a meal ticket, book by phone, or book online. If the shop takes bookings, we note through what service and when bookings open.
What happened to us. If we booked, the day we tried and the day we got. If we queued, how many minutes, with the day of the week and the time. Whether we got in alone. Whether other foreign guests were there.
These are records of one visit, dated. They are not a rating, and a different day may go differently.
Ease of visiting is a separate note about language and ordering.
- A — You can do everything in English.
- B — Pointing at the menu is enough.
- C — You will need some Japanese, or a reservation that is hard to make from abroad.
Two kinds of shop
Benchmark shops are among the country’s top-ranked. We visit them to anchor the top of our scale. Most are hard to get into, and we say so.
Walk-in guide shops are shops you can enter without a booking, or by queueing. These are the heart of the guide.
Both kinds are scored in exactly the same way.
How we choose where to go
To decide where to eat, we used Tabelog’s national ranking of tonkatsu shops as it stood on 12 October 2026. The ranking decided where we went. It did not decide any score. Every score on this site is our own.
The rules we follow
- We order the dish the shop is known for. If there is no clear signature dish, we order the rosu (loin) set.
- Scores are whole numbers.
- Every score comes from one meal on one visit. A different day, a different cook or a different cut could give a different result.
- We pay for every meal ourselves. If a shop ever gives us anything for free, the review and the video will say so at the top.
- We do not show reviews to shops before publishing.
- We review tonkatsu served on a plate or as a set meal, whatever the sauce. We do not review rice-bowl dishes such as katsudon.
Shops that are not listed
We only publish shops that score 70 or higher. A shop that does not appear here is either one we have not visited or one that scored below 70. We do not say which.
Provisional scores
Our first five reviews are marked provisional. With no shops to compare against, the early scores are our best estimate. Once five shops are published we will re-score all of them once, state what changed, and leave them fixed after that.