Savor Scout › Food guides › Katsu
How to find good katsu
Katsu is a breaded, fried cutlet — usually pork (tonkatsu) — served with shredded cabbage, rice and a thick sweet-savoury sauce. Specialist katsu restaurants in Japan do nothing else, and the best US ones are close to that.
What separates a good one from a bad one
- Panko that is light and crisp — Coarse, fresh breadcrumbs, fried golden. It should crunch and not soak up oil.
- Thick, juicy pork — Loin (rosu) or tenderloin (hire), cut thick and still slightly pink and juicy.
- Sliced and resting — Cut into strips and served on a rack so the bottom stays crisp.
- Endless cabbage — Finely shredded raw cabbage, often refilled, with sesame dressing.
- Sauce you grind yourself — Some places give you sesame seeds to grind before adding tonkatsu sauce. A sign of care.
What to order
- Rosu katsu set — Pork loin with rice, cabbage and miso soup.
- Hire katsu — Leaner tenderloin.
- Katsu curry — With Japanese curry sauce.
- Katsudon — Cutlet simmered with egg over rice.
- Katsu sando — In a sandwich with crustless milk bread.
Where to find Katsu
Katsu is mostly found at Japanese restaurants, so that is where to look. Open listings put 13,468 of them across the US, and these are the cities and campuses with the most.
Cities with the most
New York, NY 528 Los Angeles, CA 274 San Francisco, CA 192 Honolulu, HI 192 Las Vegas, NV 148 Seattle, WA 122 Chicago, IL 121 San Diego, CA 94
Campuses with the most within a mile
NYU 176 Touro University 163 The Graduate Center 163 Baruch 162 New School University 154 FIT 132
A few to start with
- icca — New York, NY
20 Warren St, New York - Azay — Los Angeles, CA
226 1st St, Los Angeles - Zaoh — San Francisco, CA
1555 Mission St, San Francisco - Irifune Restaurant — Honolulu, HI
850 Mililani St, Honolulu - Bocho Sushi — Las Vegas, NV
124 S 6th St Ste 150, Las Vegas - joybento — Seattle, WA
214 Madison St, Seattle
Counts are listings in Overture Maps open data (September 2026), counted by the town in each address. Independent places only in the examples above, and they are a starting point rather than a ranking.
How Savor Scout looks for it
The search reads for tonkatsu, panko, thick-cut and Japanese, and favours katsu specialists over places that serve a thin, generic breaded chicken.
Looking in a particular city?
Each of these opens Savor Scout with the location already set, so you can say what you want and it searches from there. It covers 1,000 US cities in total — these are simply the largest.
- New York, NY
- Los Angeles, CA
- Chicago, IL
- Houston, TX
- Philadelphia, PA
- Phoenix, AZ
- San Antonio, TX
- San Diego, CA
- Dallas, TX
- San Jose, CA
- Austin, TX
- Indianapolis, IN
- Jacksonville, FL
- San Francisco, CA
- Columbus, OH
- Charlotte, NC
- Fort Worth, TX
- Detroit, MI
- El Paso, TX
- Memphis, TN
- Seattle, WA
- Denver, CO
- Washington, DC
- Boston, MA
- Nashville, TN
- Baltimore, MD
- Oklahoma City, OK
- Louisville, KY
- Portland, OR
- Las Vegas, NV
- Milwaukee, WI
- Albuquerque, NM
- Tucson, AZ
- Fresno, CA
- Sacramento, CA
- Long Beach, CA
- Kansas City, MO
- Mesa, AZ
- Virginia Beach, VA
- Atlanta, GA
- Colorado Springs, CO
- Omaha, NE
- Raleigh, NC
- Miami, FL
- Oakland, CA
- Minneapolis, MN
- Tulsa, OK
- Cleveland, OH
- Wichita, KS
- Arlington, TX
- New Orleans, LA
- Bakersfield, CA
- Tampa, FL
- Honolulu, HI
- Aurora, CO
- Anaheim, CA
- Santa Ana, CA
- St. Louis, MO
- Riverside, CA
- Corpus Christi, TX