​Katsu chicken curry. Delicious. One of Wagamama’s best sellers. No wonder others are jumping on the bandwagon. This product caught my pedantic eye several weeks ago and here’s why it irks me.

I began my maiden guest column on The Cotswold Gentleman ruminating the meaning of authenticity. After I wrote it, I asked my Japanese colleague Toshi what he thought authentic meant in the context of a restaurant. He slept on it and came to me the next day: “I think authentic is when I eat something and it reminds me of what I used to eat at home.”

That made sense to me: authenticity is about taste. Sometimes it is used to distinguish from fusion, but unlike some antonyms, there are grey areas. To label something as authentic ignores the fact that at some point in history, every dish evolved from a creative vision that was probably born out of necessity, the mother of invention.

It is not about what dishes you serve. More times than I care to remember, I have had tackle the assumption that because we are a Japanese restaurant, we must serve sushi. For them, Japanese food is synonymous with sushi. Pizza is one of the most popular takeaway foods in the UK, but no one told Anthony Carluccio or Georgio Locatelli that they must serve pizza.

My most memorable meals in Japan have been in specialist restaurants. Noodle restaurants that specialise in udon, ramen or soba. Kushiyaki restaurants that serve only skewers. Teppanyaki, sukiyaki or shabu shabu restaurants that have perfected the art of tableside cooking. Tempura restaurants where the chef can tell the temperature of the oil by dipping a chopstick into it.

Most of these experiences were not expensive, but they demonstrated to me the breadth of Japanese cuisine. I did not bemoan the lack of variety on any menu, but instead was thankful that chefs willing to spend thousands of days in the kitchen, dedicating themselves to the monotonous task of mastering a particular craft.

Sure, sushi is the poster boy of Japanese cuisine. It is photogenic and unique. There are dumplings across the world, from pasties in Cornwall, dimsum in China and saltenas in Bolivia. There are pasta and noodles from Italy to Vietnam. Virtually every culture that ever had fire has skewers, from kebabs in the Middle East to anticuchos in Peru. And yet, despite all the countries that have access to the ocean’s bounty, no one serves fish quite the way that the Japanese do. Others may eat it raw, but they smoke it first, like the Scots, pickle it like the Scandinavians or cure it with lime like the Peruvians.

I remember filming one episode of MasterChef where Gregg Wallace quipped that someone’s undercooked fish was like eating sushi. The director made him refilm the soundbite, replacing the word sushi with the word sashimi. Sushi is only sushi if it is served with vinegared rice. It doesn’t mean raw fish.

Although I knew this much, I once made a similar mistake at a small neighbourhood restaurant in Japan. From my limited knowledge of Japanese, I fathomed that the chef was asking me if I liked sashimi. I nodded enthusiastically and soon received a selection of raw pigs liver, thinly sliced raw pigs heart, pigs tripe cut into noodles and slices of pork fat. Unwilling to lose face or appear ungrateful, I doused it uncouthly with the accompanying condiments of grated ginger, sesame oil and soy sauce and hoped for the best. I quickly learned that sashimi refers to the way something is cut. It doesn’t mean fish, or even raw.

So back to my stated bugbear: katsu chicken curry. Ton-katsu is a pork cutlet that is coated in panko  (Japanese breadcrumbs) and deep fried. Although it is thought to have evolved from Austrian schnitzels, it has been in the Japanese diet so long that even they debate whether it is wa-shoku (authentic Japanese cooking) or yo-shoku (foreign cooking). Toshi reckons it depends what type of sauce you serve it with. For him, if it’s with a deep and rich miso sauce, then it is wa-shoku. It is often served with a dab of mustard and Bull-Dog Tonkatsu sauce, which is a fruit based brown sauce flavoured with Worcestershire-style sauce. Presumably that’s why the brand is called Bull-Dog – I couldn’t quickly find a company history.

Ton-katsu is an amalgamation of two words. ‘Ton’ is the Japanese word for pork. Katsu is an abbreviation of the word ‘cutlet’. Japanese people found it difficult to pronounce cutlet, so they broke it down into sounds that they could pronounce: ka-tsu-re-tsu. But because two syllables is better than four, it became simply ‘katsu’. Unhelpfully for gaijin (non-Japanese people) there’s also ‘tonkotsu’, which refers to the milky pork broth served with Hakata-style ramen.

Evidently, pork is not the only thing that you can cover in breadcrumbs. Hence, chicken katsu. As nice as anything that’s coated in panko and deep fried is, rice and breaded chicken cutlet is potentially rather bland and dry so the Japanese adopted another alien sauce to make it taste even better: curry (‘ka-re’ to the Japanese). British and Portuguese imported spices from south Asia and the Japanese used them to create a milder, sweeter version to suit their tastes. And so katsu kare became a thing.

Thanks to the popularity of chains like Wagamama, YoSushi and Itsu, katsu has become synonymous with the sauce it is usually served with. The British palate is becoming ever more adventurous beyond the realms of Chinese and Indian food and what happens next is that supermarkets want a piece of Asian action and start selling Katsu Chicken Curry (by City Kitchen, sold in Tesco) or Katsu Chicken Pie (by Morrisons Taste of Asia), with not a katsu in sight. I have no idea whether their R&D and marketing departments bother to look into what katsu actually means, but I guess “Indian-inspired Japanese-style curry sauce that tastes good with Katsu” isn’t quite as punchy on the packaging.

With Japan coming ever more into focus with the Rugby World Cup and Tokyo Olympics in 2019 and 2020 respectively, we are pleased to introduce our new guest blogger, Koj, who is half Japanese and opened a Japanese restaurant and cocktail bar in Cheltenham that seeks to educate and entertain anyone who (mistakenly) believes that Japanese food is all about sushi..

Introducing Kojitate: the pedantic but informative column about Japanese food

Authentic is a word that gets bandied around glibly. Last month, So Thai, rated by Tripadvisor as the number one restaurant in Gloucester, made the news by replying to a review that expressed disappointment in the authenticity of Thai restaurants in the UK. The member was comparing them to “Sydney where Thai restaurants are great”.

My own favourite at Koj Cheltenham remains the disgruntled reviewer that recommended readers to go elsewhere “forauthentic Japanese tapas”. A culinary oxymoron, if ever I heard one.

There are thousands of anecdotes across TripAdvisor, but the one that takes the biscuit is The Shed at Dulwich (in South London, where I grew up). I’ve recently shared the documentary on our Facebook page. It’s the story of Oobah Butler, a freelance writer, being paid to write fake TripAdvisor reviews. Disillusioned by the ease at which he could make or break the reputation of a business, he decides to stage an elaborate prank in which the restaurant itself is fake. He verifies his listing with a pay as you go phone and some faked photographs then coordinates a campaign of positive reviews from his friends. Within weeks, he is turning away bookings from customers intrigued by this ‘weird’ but ‘homely’ restaurant where you eat outside. It is impossible to get a table. Literally, because it doesn’t exist but after seven months, The Shed hits the coveted number one spot on TripAdvisor, ahead of over 18,000 actual restaurants. Deciding to call time, Oobah executes the finale to the story by creating a culinary version of the Emperor’s New Clothes. He finally accepts bookings from real customers, leads them blindfolded down the scruffy lane to his garden shed, surrounds them with actors and feeds them powdered soup in a mug and lasagne ready meals, topped with ‘foraged’ micro cress. The customers rave about the food and say they’ll be back.

Back to real life. One customer remarked to me that our food was delicious, but not authentic. “Not authentic?” I asked.

“Well, there’s no sushi.” That’s the point. We don’t do sushi, because Japanese people don’t just eat sushi. In fact, they rarely eat sushi, compared to all the other things they eat. As a result, we have a lot of customers who don’t like sushi, or fish at all, for that matter. Many of them have never been to a Japanese restaurant because they have been conditioned to believe that a Japanese restaurant is a sushi restaurant.

“Well at least you liked the food. Have you been to Japan?” I asked, hoping to discuss his memories of yakitori, shabu shabu, sukiyaki or okonomiyaki. He had not. But he had opinions and beliefs about authenticity.

The ultimate authentic Japanese dining experience would presumably involve sitting in a restaurant in Japan, surrounded by Japanese customers, eating Japanese ingredients, cooked by Japanese chefs, served on Japanese plates by Japanese waiters. But then you probably wouldn’t call it authentic, because it would be tautologically unnecessary.

So what hope for Japanese restaurants in the UK? Or Thai, or any other cuisine which is judged on authenticity? What does authentic even mean? Does it mean that the ingredients are imported, often frozen, rather than bought locally? Or is it authentic to adopt a Japanese ethos of celebrating  the food produced by the seasons? Does having a Japanese chef make it more authentic? If so, I’m pretty sure that Jamie’s Italian restaurants have a pretty good chance of being authentically Eastern European. Does authentic mean that the dishes are cooked according to recipes published by an accepted authority on Japanese cuisine (like Shizuo Tsuji), without being bastardised by fusion or deconstruction?

One customer recently advised us that our ramen toppings were incorrect. He had been to Japan. We smiled and nodded politely because lunch service wasn’t the time or place for the debate. I didn’t realise there was a ramen rule book. That somewhere along the line, someone decided that enough was enough. That this peasant dish of carbohydrates, soup and scraps that originated in China had spent long enough in the Japanese development kitchen and could now be officially branded as a national dish called Ramen with toppings sanctioned by the Official Ramen Society of Japan (if such a society actually exists, I’m just making a point). For the record, most food historians reckon that ramen became popular in Japan around a century ago, after the first world war. As each kitchen tried variations depending on local and cheap ingredients, different versions evolved. Skip forward a century and Hakata is known for its pork broth, Hokkaido for its miso broth and Tokyo for its soy dashi broth.

​How can any bowl of ramen be authentic? It may look and taste like one served at a ramen restaurant somewhere in Japan. Some might even argue that ramen isn’t even Japanese, at least not until it has a few more generations under its belt. Likewise, how can any Japanese restaurant in the UK be authentic? There are all sorts of restaurants in Japan. How can any restaurant in the UK claim to embody the authentic spirit of Japanese restaurants, all under one roof, by playing the culinary version of Japan’s Greatest Hits on repeat?

Next time on Kojitate #2 - The meaning of katsu 

Why this ready meal might not be “authentic​