JAPAN’S BEST WAGYU is an award that identifies the fifty finest wagyu and yakiniku restaurants in Japan. The selection committee is chaired by Takayuki Toriyama of Wagyu Journal, who eats more than 300 servings of wagyu each year, and is composed of producers, chefs and journalists with specialist knowledge of wagyu.
The selection rests on first-hand dining carried out throughout the year. Each restaurant is visited more than once as a rule, assessed across different seasons and compared between a first visit and a return. More than 200 restaurants are examined annually. Of these, the fifty placed highest under four criteria — sourcing and meat quality; seasoning, cooking and fire; performance and experience; originality — are published here.
Three principles govern the independence of the selection. First, no financial support is accepted from any restaurant, company or organization. Second, no advance notice of a visit is given: committee members reserve and dine as ordinary guests. Third, the full cost of every visit is borne by the committee members themselves. This independence is the foundation on which the credibility of the award rests.
Selection criteria in detail / The committee
The fifty restaurants are not confined to a single format. They span six categories, the highest expression of wagyu residing in more than the grill alone.
| Category | Restaurants |
|---|---|
| Yakiniku | 33 |
| Niku Kappo and meat cuisine | 8 |
| Steak | 4 |
| Sukiyaki | 2 |
| Wagyu burger | 2 |
| Shabu-shabu | 1 |
The two burger restaurants build a single plate around a patty of 100% wagyu. The committee assesses the completeness of the plate that is served, not the formal standing of the category it belongs to.
Thirty-one of the fifty are in Tokyo, a market to which wagyu is shipped from every part of the country and in which specialist restaurants are most densely concentrated. The remaining nineteen are drawn from thirteen prefectures.
Kyoto accounts for three (Niku no Miyoshi, Kuishinbo Yamanaka, Yasusan); Osaka for two (Kitan In, Mansho); Mie for two (Wadakin, Gyugin Honten); Hyogo for two (Kobe Sakaba, Aragawa); and Aichi for two (Kitchen Ribbon, Yakiniku Horumon Gensho). Hokkaido (Kita-Ushi), Iwate (Ryuen), Kanagawa (Sumibiyakiniku Horumon Sawaishi), Shiga (Niku Ryori Fukunaga), Nara (Kimiya), Hiroshima (Wagyu Lab K), Fukuoka (Yakiniku no Mr. Aoki) and Kagoshima (Nozaki) account for one each.
Restaurants close to the production regions hold supply routes that do not pass through the Tokyo market. Among the fifty are restaurants that could stand nowhere but where they are.