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>'Katsu' is short for Katsudon

katsu is cutlet, tonkatsu is pork cutlet

katsu is short for katsuretsu, which shows every sign of being transliterated from English "cutlet" and especially pleasureable, the two "su"s are this guy ツ

I stand corrected, thank you. I'm an idiot because Katsudon is a completely different dish (and I've made both dishes tons).

“Authentic” katsu curry is made from S&B Oriental Curry powder and an handful of ingredients (garlic, ginger, stock, etc…) And just buying S&B Golden curry is pretty good, better than some places in SF even.

Of course, everything tastes better after a 12 hours on a plane.

My favorite is volcano curry in SF. My go-to was pork with calamari but the stopped the calamari at some point. They have fried oysters though so I throw those on.

The most annoying thing about good katsu is when the cutlet is obviously unsalted.

My Japanese in Japan friend says the S&B is legit. I get it online and then just toss whatever in the pot with it. Great way to use up extra vegetables plus whatever meat you have handy.

Nit-pick: katsudon is katsu served on rice, usually with some condiments or vegetables. The -don suffix is the rice bowl.

> 'Katsu' is short for Katsudon

Don't you mean short for katsuretsu (カツレツ), katakana for cutlet as adopted from the French?

> If you haven't had a Japanese curry in Japan, and you didn't make it from scratch, whatever you get will be a poor imitation. Real Japanese curry tastes both fresh, simple, vegetal and clean, and artificial, at the same time.

Meh. There are tons of diasporas across the world that would beg to differ; at the end of the day, it's inexpensive comfort food to this demographic.

Personally, I'm more picky with the panko and quality of pork. It's easy to mask imperfection with curry, and almost as easy to make something distinctly tasty on the cheap.

> If there's no pork cutlet it's not Katsu. The curry is just 'kare'.

I used to push back hard on this and get annoyed with it, words have meanings let's use them correctly!

But over time I've changed my opinion. In Japan Katsu may mean something specific, but in the UK it means something different. That's language evolving, and that's a natural process. Pushing back on language changing in normal ways isn't going to achieve anything, it's an uphill battle, and it results in less clear communication because it often involves ignoring who the target audience is and treating them like another audience.

By all means correct someone who is using a word incorrectly, but trying to correct a language because it's different to the previous iteration is a lost battle.

(No comment on the food reviews though, you're absolutely right that the "real stuff" is far better.)

My problem is just that -- I go to a place; I want a katsu (cutlet) set, and all they have is katsu-don, and I'm like, "I didn't want the rice bowl with the curry sauce; I wanted the schnitzel with the A1 sauce", but people are calling both "katsu". That's my only beef. Or pork, I guess.

Well but that's like going to Poland and asking for schnitzel, if you're used to German schnitzels you're not going the thing you expect. And it's not the people making it who are wrong, it's just that the word means a different thing there.

Nah, I meant the Japanese style katsu. There's "katsu", aka cutlet, and it's basically a Japanese style schnitzel (I use the German word only for humor and to emphasize the cross-cultural nature of this food). It's traditionally served with raw cabbage, maybe pickled vegetables, and usually a thick Japanese sauce that is a distant relative of Worcestershire sauce; it's a lot like A1 steak sauce. And then there's katsu-don, which is same cutlet served atop rice in a bowl (hence the -"don"), now generally with more of a Japanese-curry sauce. But alas the latter dish seems to be outstripping the former in popularity, to the point that one cannot be sure that "katsu" without "-don" is being used to refer to the former!

On second reading, I probably misunderstood you. I think you mean that "katsu" just means something else in the UK. Which -- I guess it does. Drats! Sapir-Whorf has robbed me of a dish.

I don't even think that this falls into the normal "language evolves" fights, honestly. Katsu can be a word that means one thing in Japanese and another thing in English without any confusion in meaning. One expects that different languages will express things differently, after all. This isn't really in the same ballpark as English-speaking people misusing English words.

Food does this all the time as it moves between cultures.

Look at what in the US today is called a macaroon, a macaron, and some macaroni. Which one of those is closer to the ‘original’ Italian culinary meaning of maccherone?

The problem with that is then in a hundred years old books are hard to understand. And in several hundred they’re basically incomprehensible. However for history zero there’s nothing quite like rigid descriptivism!

I'm not a curry connoisseur, so might be missing some nuance, but it's the one food that I thought was actually decent outside Japan. I thought the katsu in Korea, Taiwan, and China were all good enough, and always liked Muracci's in SF.

If I'm in Japan for a week it's all sushi, ramen, soba, and yakiniku. There's no time for curry!

I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying different katsu curries in Japan and abroad and there are absolutely great katsu curries outside Japan. A little different, usually lacking a sweetness, but that’s more to target local palettes. Though I agree that the shop roux is a major disappointment.

Eh, I lived in Japan for 2 years, and I don't rate the curry there that highly. You can find good curry, sure, and I have my favourite places, but the baseline isn't that high. People forget Japan has basically been in a recession or depression for literally 30 years. When I think of mainstream food there, what I usually think of is "made down to a price".

I'm gonna stake a claim and say that if you go and buy a pack of golden curry medium, cut up a decent bit of rump steak, add a couple of carrots, potatoes and onions, boil the shit out of all that then mix in the curry, serve on fresh cooked rice with a handful of shredded cheddar - you're having a pretty damn good curry which will be hard to beat no matter where you go.

I'll also go out on a limb and claim that the baseline Japanese cuisine in cities with a decent size diaspora - think LA, Sydney, Bangkok - is better than in Tokyo. You have enough locals to support a lot of restaurants, and they enforce an authentic taste because they know what it should taste like, and they have more money. Your average plate will cost more, but everything in it, and the final result, is better quality.

Maybe nowadays the authentic restaurants might be more expensive, but I think historically it's been the other way round. The authentic restaurants were cheaper and opened to support the local immigrant population who wanted they tastes they were familiar with and missed from home, but the more expensive restaurants had the foods adapted to the local tastes so that they'd appeal to a wider range of people.

If you look at Chinese restaurants in the UK, the older ones have radically different menus to the newer ones that cater primarily to Chinese students. The former is mostly based on Cantonese cuisine, but changed significantly to what Westerners expect, the latter is from all over China and usually pretty authentic.

Word.