Curry House CoCo Ichibanya
24-10 Utagawacho, Shibuya, Tokyo
Web: Curry House CoCo Ichibanya
Phone: 03-5459-0460
Rating:    [learn more]
See More Restaurant Reviews For:
Favorites Japanese Tokyo

"Every Japanese city now has multiple restaurants that serve nothing more than variations on curry with rice, many permitting substantial customization of the ingredients and flavors."

Convincing you to read past a single word in the next sentence is the most daunting challenge we face in telling you about one of the very best foods served in Japan today. The word is half of its name - "Katsu Curry" - and if you grew up in the United States, you can probably guess which half is the challenge. At least one generation of Americans were taught to reflexively recoil when they heard the word "curry," to shun the very possibility that its spicy Indian fragrance might appeal to them, and to just say no to cooking, trying, or liking it. Yet the British learned of its charms years ago during their colonization of India, recently developing a full-on national taste for curry dishes, and the Japanese have similarly embraced Indian-style curry - even more traditionally than neighbors such as the Chinese and Thais, who have their own substantially different "curries" that are completely different except in name. Today, Japan's love for all things curry has made the flavor virtually inescapable: it is now found in drinks, such as a special, spicy version of the typically bubblegum-flavored Ramune soda, in steamed and baked buns of bread that can be picked up and carried anywhere, and in Katsu Curry, the main topic of today's article. Katsu Curry is very high on our list of Japanese dishes that really should be served in Western New York but currently aren't, which is surprising in that it's so hugely popular in Japan, and relatively easy to make at home.

A rough Japanese transliteration of the word "cutlet," katsu generally refers to a panko bread crumb-battered, deep-fried piece of pork (called "tonkatsu"), chicken ("torikatsu") or beef ("beef katsu") that's around half the size of a steak. The result is similar to the Austrian dish wiener schnitzel, but with a far more interesting breading and a considerably thicker piece of meat. Knives aren't needed since Katsu is almost invariably served pre-sliced, and in its most basic form sans-curry, it arrives with a special "tonkatsu sauce" that blends two rice wines with sugar, ketchup, worcestershire sauce, ginger, and garlic to create something that looks and tastes like a thickened, sweetened soy sauce. We normally don't like worcestershire sauce on its own, but when it's mixed in with the other flavors here, it just works, and the few restaurants in Western New York that serve tonkatsu or chicken katsu typically offer it with this sauce on the side. Either rice or thinly-sliced cabbage is included, as well. All of the items necessary to make katsu cutlets at home are readily available locally.

Katsu Curry is an evolution of the standard tonkatsu entree. It has the same core of panko-breaded meat, but what's underneath it is different: a pool, and generally a large one, of gravy. This gravy is curry, and can either be made from scratch or purchased pre-prepared in boxes from companies such as S&B ("Golden Curry") and House ("Vermont Curry"). To be clear about several things up front: Japanese curry sauce flavors - yes, plural - are similar but not identical to Indian curries, with tastes and ingredients that vary from restaurant to restaurant. They're generally stewed reductions of meat, vegetable, and/or fruit stock, and arrive in some shade of brown, thick rather than runny, and both a little spicy and a little sweet. At Curry House CoCo Ichibanya, a popular katsu curry chain in Japan that's expanding outside the country's borders, the main curries are offered in 12 levels of spice, with two stages before level 1 of spiciness, "3" meaning "has a good kick," "7" meaning "watch out," and "10" approaching the true "unpleasantly hot" danger zone. During our recent visit to CoCo, four different curry sauces were being offered: the standard curry had pork as a base, alongside a beef curry base, and a "hash and rice" version; "keema curry" - an even spicier version made with onions, potatoes, meat, garlic, and ginger - was offered as a limited time fourth alternative, alone or with Indian naan bread.

In and of itself, these sauces can range from merely compelling to intoxicating, regardless of whether you're spice fanatics like us or just enjoy a rich spiced fruit and vegetable gravy. One small Japanese restaurant chain, Little Spoon, used to make and even package outstanding curries that ranged from fruity and sweet to powerfully spicy and rich; the chain has since experienced financial difficulties and downgraded its menu. Another restaurant, the similarly tiny M's Curry in Sasaduka, has been rated by Tokyoites as offering the best curry sauce in town - unfortunately, we arrived only to find it closed only days after an internationally circulated Bloomberg News report discussing its quality. Like the numerous Thai curries, including green, yellow, red, Massaman, Panang, and Prik Khing, the Japanese variations on Indian curry can transform a bed of normally plain steamed white rice into a meal in and of itself; the meat topping is, in fact, often smaller in size than the rice underneath. Restaurants commonly offer larger-sized portions that vary more in the quantity of rice - 0.44 pounds to 1.1 pounds - than in the other items on the plate.

But for every fine to good stock version of katsu curry out there, there's another that can be customized to your personal liking with all sorts of additional toppings that go well beyond the breaded cutlets mentioned above. Our deluxe katsu photograph shows how one pork cutlet and one beef cutlet were placed atop a bed of rice and a generous helping of level-7 spicy curry with shrimp, squid, and clams inside. This dish is a three-course meal without any additional accompaniment, growing from a $10 base plate to $19 after the seafood and second cutlet were added. By comparison, a second plate is shown with a piece of tonkatsu and rice, plus added potatoes, carrots, and green beans, while the level-3 curry is less thick - the difference due to the lower spice level - and the plate is less filling. At CoCo Ichibanya, however, the composure of your entree is entirely up to you. Sausages, minced meat, hamburgers, cheese, individual vegetables, and unbreaded pork, beef, and chicken are just some of the alternatives that can be added as secondary items, or chosen as the main topping if you don't want something with panko breading. The selection at CoCo is awesome, and the plates filling, even if the ingredients aren't as completely amazing as at our favorite curry places in the past.

Given how spectacular the results are with just curry, rice, and meat, it's interesting and a little surprising that a slightly different recipe has become regionally popular in Japan and is now spreading to the United States. Go! Go! Curry (1-11-7 Soto-Kanda, Chiyoda-ku, Akihabara, 03-6206-9855) is a growing Kanazawa, Japan-based chain identified by gorilla logos and bright yellow and red signs. Westerners mightn't recognize that the name is a reference to the Yankees' Hideki Matsui (Go-Go is Japanese for Matsui's number 55), but that didn't stop the New York City location from opening two years ago to some acclaim. It's hardly the first katsu curry restaurant in America, but due to superior marketing savvy and an amusing sense of humor, it stands out from the California-based katsu shops we've visited, and attracts disproportionate attention in Japan, as well.

The version of "katsu curry" Go! Go! sells actually combines a cutlet, curry and rice with a squirted-on Tonkatsu Sauce topping and a pile of shredded cabbage - essentially, a fusion of standard tonkatsu and katsu curry plates into a single dish. In Japan, the chain offers katsu plates in increasingly large airplane seat size classes (healthy class, economy class, business class, first class), instead using baseball hits (walk, single, double, triple) in New York. There's also a "Major Curry World Champion Class" plate for $30 with an insane 5.5 pounds of ingredients - cutlets, sausages, shrimp, and eggs among them. Based on a set of photographs posted outside, only 14 people have succeeded in finishing it, and we weren't about to attempt the feat.

But is Go! Go!'s version good? It has a lot of fans, one of us included, but it feels like overkill - the curry or the tonkatsu sauce is enough on its own to flavor the cutlet, and when used together, the only question is whether you'll find that one dilutes the other's flavor. We split a little on this topic, with one person finding that the tonkatsu sauce distracted a little from the curry, while the other found it to be additive. In any case, we both preferred standard katsu curry from places such as CoCo Ichibanya to the Kanazawa take, but the quality of Go! Go!'s meats is pretty good, apart from its mayonnaise-covered fried shrimp, which really do not benefit from the added layer of creamy topping.

Japan's infatuation with katsu curry and curry in general is impressive: every city and town now has multiple restaurants that serve nothing more than variations on curry with rice, and many permit substantial customization of the ingredients and flavors. For the time being, we'd be thrilled if a single Japanese restaurant in Western New York served authentic katsu curry - not some half-baked substitute - as a single menu option; under the right conditions, it wouldn't be a huge surprise to see numerous variations on the dish come to occupy an entire section of a local restaurant's menu, or even take over a complete storefront. Yes, it's that great. If you have a desire to make it at home like we do, start with this simple katsu curry recipe; even readers who think they're curry adverse might fall in love as we have.