Tonkatsu, and the Sauce With the Dog on It

We used to drive into San Francisco to buy Japanese groceries. Japantown was where you went if you actually wanted the real ingredients, and we would come back with a car full of things you could not get anywhere else.

I could not read the labels. What I could do was recognize a picture.

So every time, I would ask my mom to get the one with the dog on it.

The One With the Dog on It

That was Bulldog sauce, and I have never stopped buying it. It is what we use at Juraku on both the pork and the chicken katsu, and it is on the menu for exactly that reason, which is not a very sophisticated one. I like it and I have always liked it.

Here is the part I only learned much later. The dog is on the bottle on purpose, and the reason is almost exactly why it worked on me.

The company started in 1902 as Misawaya Shoten, and became Bulldog Sauce in 1926. Around 1900, imported bulldogs were fashionable pets in Japan. Western-style food, yoshoku, was also foreign and new. So the thinking was that the sauce should be something people took in and doted on the way they doted on an imported dog.

They picked an image a child would point at, over a century ago, and it was still working on a kid in a California grocery store who could not read the writing next to it.

Why That Bottle

Japan has three standard sauces in this family, and they are not interchangeable.

Worcester sauce is thin and runny, sharply acidic and spicy. Chuno, medium sauce, is thicker, with sweetness and heat together. Kikkoman introduced chuno in 1964, the year of the Tokyo Olympics, positioned deliberately between the other two. Tonkatsu sauce is the thickest of the three and the sweetest.

All three are made from vegetables and fruit with seasoning. What separates them is viscosity and sugar.

Bulldog made its name on Worcester sauce, to the point where the brand became shorthand for it, and I think that house character carries through the rest of the range. Their tonkatsu sauce reads more acidic to me than a lot of other brands.

That is a preference, not a fact about quality. Plenty of people want the sweeter, rounder version and they are not wrong. But a fried pork cutlet is a rich thing, and I want something with enough acid in it to cut back rather than pile on. That is the whole argument.

Why We Call It Katsu

On our menu it is katsu, not tonkatsu, and there is a reason.

Ton is pork. Katsu is short for katsuretsu, which is the Japanese rendering of the English word cutlet. So tonkatsu literally means pork cutlet, and if you are not serving pork, the word is wrong.

We do both pork and chicken, and chicken katsu is a completely normal thing to call it in Japan. Dropping the ton is not us simplifying for an American menu. It is the accurate word for a menu that offers both.

It Started as a Thin Cutlet

Tonkatsu is a yoshoku dish, meaning Western-style food adapted in Japan during and after the Meiji era, and it did not arrive in its current form.

In 1895, Rengatei in Ginza started selling a pork katsuretsu served with raw shredded cabbage. The meat was still thin then, closer to a European cutlet fried in a pan.

The thing we would recognize came later. In 1929, a shop in Ueno Okachimachi called Ponchiken is credited with first selling tonkatsu, created by a cook named Shinjiro Shimada, who had previously cooked Western food for the Imperial Household.

What he changed matters. The pork got thick. It was deep-fried in a lot of oil, the way tempura is, rather than shallow-fried like a cutlet. It was cut into strips before it reached the table so it could be eaten with chopsticks. And it was served with shredded cabbage, rice and miso soup.

That last part is the real move. He took a European dish and rebuilt it as a Japanese one, in the format a Japanese meal already had.

The Cabbage Is Not Garnish

The pile of raw shredded cabbage is not decoration, and it got there by accident.

During the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, cooks were conscripted and restaurants ran short-staffed. Shredded raw cabbage could be prepped in advance and did not need a cook standing over it, so it became the standard side.

It stayed because it works. Cabbage is crisp, cold, faintly sweet and almost entirely neutral, which is exactly what you want next to something hot and fried. It resets your mouth between bites in the same way karashi does with kakuni.

If you are eating tonkatsu and leaving the cabbage, you are working harder than you need to.

And Then Someone Put It on Curry

The other thing that happens to a cutlet in Japan is that it ends up on top of curry rice, which is a whole story of its own and one I have already written down.

The curry post covers where that came from, including the baseball player generally blamed for it.

Ours

Pork or chicken, breaded and fried, with Bulldog on the side.

There is no innovation here and I do not want any. This is a simple, extremely common dish in Japan, the kind of thing you eat without thinking about it. For me it is nostalgic and comforting and delicious, in that order, and that is the entire reason it is on our menu.

Some food you put on a menu because you thought of something clever. Some you put on because it tastes like being a kid in the back of a car coming home from Japantown.

Try It at Juraku

Katsu is on the menu at Izakaya Juraku, Lower East Side, in pork or chicken. Eat the cabbage.

See the rest of the menu.