JAPAN’S BEST WAGYU is an award that selects the 50 finest wagyu and yakiniku restaurants in Japan. The list is decided by Takayuki Toriyama of Wagyu Journal, who eats his way through more than 300 servings of wagyu a year, together with a selection committee of industry experts, weighing the four criteria below as a whole.
The restaurant’s relationships with producers and production regions, the freshness of the beef, and its eye for breed and grade. We look at whether it has built a system for securing outstanding meat consistently, and at the owner’s judgment in choosing it.
Cutting, seasoning, cooking technique, and precision with heat. This is where a chef’s craft is tested: drawing out everything that makes a particular cut of beef distinctive.
The room, the service, the hospitality, the conversation with the owner. We assess not only the food but the quality of the entire time spent at the restaurant.
A philosophy, a style, or an undertaking that exists nowhere else. We assess each restaurant’s contribution to wagyu culture and its influence on the industry as a whole.
Committee members eat their way through wagyu and yakiniku restaurants across Japan throughout the year. As a rule, each restaurant is visited more than once, evaluated in different seasons and compared between a first visit and a return, so that we can judge what a restaurant truly is.
Candidates come from committee members’ personal lists, recommendations from people inside the industry, and attention on social media and in the press, amounting to more than 200 restaurants each year. From those, the 50 that score highly across all four criteria are announced as this ranking.
JAPAN’S BEST WAGYU accepts no financial support of any kind from any restaurant, company, or organization. Our committee gives restaurants no advance notice of a visit: members book and dine as ordinary guests, going through exactly the same reservation and arrival process as anyone else.
This independence is, we believe, the foundation on which the credibility of this ranking rests.