The Katsuification of Britain
The Katsuification of Britain
Katsu Curry Ouroboros. Words by Tim Anderson. Illustration by Sinjin Li.
Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Each Monday we publish a different piece of writing related to food, whether it’s an essay, a dispatch, a polemic, a review, or even poetry. This week, Tim Anderson writes about the phenomenon of katsuification — the process under which everything in Britain has become katsu curry — and how this can be explained by the cyclical history of the dish.
If you wish to receive Vittles Recipes on Wednesday and Vittles Restaurants on Friday for £5 a month, or £45 a year, then please subscribe below – each subscription helps us pay writers fairly and gives you access to our entire back catalogue.
The Katsuification of Britain
How everything in Britain became katsu curry, by Tim Anderson. Illustration by Sinjin Li.
In December 2020, during the darkest depths of the UK’s third, most depressing, lockdown, McDonald’s announced that they would start selling katsu curry chicken nuggets. The limited special would pair McD’s pre-existing sweet curry dip with a lightly spiced, breadcrumbed version of the usually battered McNuggets. Typically, British McDonald’s specials are uninspiring when compared with other countries’ – ill-conceived downgrades like the Chicken Big Mac, and confusing misappropriations like the Jamaican Jerk Chicken Sandwich. But the Katsu Curry McNuggets felt clever, exciting, and uniquely in tune with British tastes – and McDonald’s knew it. They announced the new dish on Twitter with a concise, confident, and self-explanatory message: ‘Katsu. McNuggets. That’s it, that’s the tweet.’
The launch of the nuggets was a major coup in the ongoing katsuification of the UK, a phenomenon which shows no sign of abating. Katsu curry is everywhere, and everything is katsu curry. It has made the leap from fast-casual high street menus onto supermarket shelves: in addition to bottled sauces and meal kits, there are katsu curry crisps, katsu curry tinned mackerel, chicken katsu spring rolls, chicken katsu curry wraps, katsu rice noodles, katsu salads, mushroom katsu curry keto meal pouches, crunchy coated katsu curry peanuts, katsu curry cheese, katsu curry chicken kievs, and chicken katsu curry baby food.
Not to be beaten by McDonald’s, in 2022 Burger King UK launched a ‘Katsu Chilli’ Whopper and a Katsu Chicken Royale. As of last month, Greggs sells katsu curry bakes, while Upper Crust, M&S, and Harvester have all launched katsu curry sandwiches. Katsu curry – alongside pizza, burgers and pasties – has become a permanent fixture of the British high street, in Itsu and Wasabi, as well as a motorway service station staple, available via Chozen and Chopstix. Food service suppliers like Brakes and Bidfood are selling it into offices, hospitals, and care homes. Just this morning, I received the lunch menu for the new term at my daughter’s school, and sure enough, there it is: ‘katsu vegetables with rice’ is now part of the rotation. You can even get katsu curry in a can. Every British recipe writer has had a go with katsu curry, from Joe Wicks (‘Cheeky Chicken Katsu’) to Mary Berry, who bafflingly claims the dish is named ‘after the region it is from’ (there is no such region). MOB Kitchen alone has published twelve separate katsu curry recipes, from chicken katsu toast to a crispy ‘chicken’ pumpkin katsu curry burger. It may go without saying that not all of these recipes contain actual ‘katsu’ (the Japanese term for a fried, breadcrumbed cutlet); this persistent problem triggered the ‘katsu curry police’ crackdown of early 2020. I’ve got to hold my hands up here, too. Even as someone who should (and does) know better, I’ve committed my own misdemeanours, including recipes for cauliflower and aubergine katsu curries.
The katsu curry craze is a specifically British phenomenon; it isn’t derived from a larger international trend. American supermarket shelves are not laden with katsu curry products. Burger King never sold their Katsu Range in Canada or Australia, and McDonald’s didn’t release their katsu curry nuggets anywhere else either. The trend is also a recent one – the ubiquity of katsu curry feels sudden and unprecedented. Unlike chicken tikka masala, it does not derive from a major wave of immigration to the country; unlike burgers, it is not inspired by a country that wields global cultural hegemony. But while the trend seems to have come out of nowhere, perhaps it should come as no surprise. After all, katsu curry is British food. Or, at least, it was.
Katsu curry has come full circle around the globe, from Britain to Japan and back to Britain again. Curry was first introduced to Japan by the British navy in the early Meiji period, at a time when the imperial Japanese government was keen to get the nation eating more meat in order to counteract nutritional deficiencies. Spices in curry helped mask the unfamiliar stink of beef, pork, and mutton, while also carrying a certain cosmopolitan appeal and the aura of imperial power. Early Japanese curries were inspired by London-based Crosse & Blackwell’s curry powder, and informed by British Victorian recipes (which included ingredients like apples, bananas, dripping, honey, and a characteristic flour-based roux to thicken the sauce like a gravy). The oldest known Japanese recipe for curry appeared in a book called 西洋料理通正 (Guide to Western Cookery), which was published in 1872. It contains only meat, leeks, butter, flour, water, curry powder, and salt.
Curry was categorised as yōshoku – Western food – although its South Asian origins could be glimpsed through a colonial lens, with stereotypical ‘Indian’ imagery frequently deployed in the branding and advertising of popular Shōwa brands (like Oriental Curry and Osaka’s Indian Curry). Today, curry’s origins have been obscured and complicated by its enthusiastic adoption into mainstream Japanese cuisine. Fumio Tanga, proprietor of the okonomiyaki and yōshoku pop-up Sho Foo Doh, says, ‘Personally, I always thought curry came from India growing up. I had no idea that our curry was influenced by British curry.’ Chef, author, and cookery instructor Atsuko Ikeda agrees: ‘I don’t think many Japanese people in Japan associate Japanese curry with its British origins. I actually found [out] about this connection after moving to the UK. Japanese curry has been so thoroughly adapted and integrated into Japanese cuisine that most people in Japan now see it as a distinctly Japanese dish.’
Katsu curry – with the addition of fried cutlets – appears to be an independent Japanese invention, appearing as early as 1918 (although there were recipes for similar preparations published in the UK around the same time). While cutlets with curry didn’t become a full-blown thing in the UK until katsu curry boomeranged back a century later, the combination of deep-fried protein and mild curry sauce is nothing new. Over the course of the mid-twentieth century, various Anglicised curry sauces eventually merged and morphed into ‘chip shop curry sauce’. In many ways, this is remarkably similar to Japanese curry: it’s also made with curry powder, thickened with starch, golden to bronze in colour, smooth in texture, and mellow in flavour, with an emphasis on floral and sweet spices rather than sharp or pungent ones. Fish and chips with curry sauce is, essentially, the same flavour profile as katsu curry, just with a different kind of crispy coating and a different pile of carbs on the side. And I’m not the first person to notice the resemblance. In 2017, the now-defunct Gilly’s Fry Bar of Finsbury Park leaned hard into the similarity and utilised tempura techniques to create what was described as a ‘fish and chip shop with an Asian twist.’ Notably, owner-chef Neil Gill said the concept was inspired by conversations with his former employer: Alan Yau, the creator of Wagamama.
Wagamama has been the single greatest driving force behind the current katsu curry boom. When the first restaurant opened on Streatham Street in 1992, it was conceived as a healthy ramen bar with a particular focus on kaizen (the Japanese concept of continuous improvement). At this time, Japanese food had a reputation in Britain as an ascetic cuisine – in a sceptical article about the nascent Japanese food boom for the Independent in 1994, Michael Bateman wrote that ‘Japanese must be one of the world’s most resistible cuisines’, citing raw fish, seaweed, and dried cuttlefish as a few of the Japanese foods he (and others) found off-putting. Yau, meanwhile, predicted that more casual Japanese dishes like ramen could be mainstreamed (‘I believe that noodles are going to be the next pizza,’ he later declared). But it was the familiar flavours of katsu curry – the menu’s breakout hit – that cut through, with an enormous crossover appeal.
Wagamama’s long-serving global executive chef Steve Mangleshot confirmed to me via email that ‘katsu curry is and always has been the most popular dish at Wagamama,’ selling in the region of six million servings each year. By the early 2010s, it accounted for an impressive 17% of the chain’s sales. Mangleshot once explained how katsu curry had singular appeal because of its unintimidating nature: ‘It doesn’t scare people. People read “fried chicken, rice, curry sauce” and think, “Oh, I can eat that!”’ He also fully credits Yau for the initial recipe, which he says ‘has remained greatly untouched’ throughout its thirty years of existence (except for some minor tweaks made to the supermarket meal kit version).
In 1993, CCR, the restaurant group behind Frankie & Benny’s, announced plans to launch a new American-inspired curry restaurant modelled after Wagamama, meaning Britain would have a Western-influenced Indian curry house named after a British-Hong-Kong-owned Japanese restaurant serving a Western-influenced Japanese curry which had distant origins in India. (Wagamama took the restaurant group to court for infringement of trademark, preventing the restaurant from using their proposed name, ‘Rajamama’.) This kind of cultural confusion isn’t a bug, but a key feature of the whole katsu curry phenomenon. In Recentering Globalisation, Koichi Iwabuchi explains the idea of ‘cultural odour’ – how things call to mind a particular place through subtle signifiers and aesthetic characteristics. But some things can be culturally odourless – evoking nowhere in particular – which allows them to be more readily and fully adopted into another culture (Iwabuchi cites video games and electronics as key Japanese examples of this phenomenon). If there isn’t really a consensus on where katsu curry is from and what it’s meant to taste like, then katsu curry can be anything, and anything can be katsu curry.
For example, Wagamama’s version of katsu curry – which could be called a textbook version of the contemporary British iteration of the dish – contains coconut, which is almost never used in typical Japanese curry. The result is something that evokes a broad, vague idea of ‘Asian-ness’ while being disconnected from any specific place in Asia. M&S katsu curry crisps, like many ‘katsu’ products, are clearly modelled on the Wagamama style, with distinct notes of coconut and citric acid. Pringles’ version, on the other hand, has a more straightforward, more Japanese curry-powder-and-stock-cube flavour. They are not the same. But the misunderstood, poorly defined identity of katsu curry allows both to exist under the same name – a process of glocalisation that hasn’t quite rendered it culturally odourless, but has certainly made it indistinct. When I asked Ikeda if she thought coconutty, British ‘katsu’ curry in the Wagamama school could be reconciled as a sort of subgenre of Japanese curry, she was diplomatic. ‘These variations are interesting fusions,’ she said, ‘but they are totally different from Japanese katsu curry. I think it has more to do with marketing.’
Marketability, of course, is everything – which is exactly how katsu curry wound up on the menu of the other Big W of the high street: Wetherspoons. In 2022, the chain launched a small katsu curry menu across all of its pubs after a successful trial run in a few dozen branches. Wetherspoons spokesman Eddie Gershon tells me that ‘Five years ago, if you’d have suggested [adding] ramen or katsu curry [to the menu], people would have laughed at you,’ which speaks to how quickly katsu has saturated the market. Wetherspoons, unlike Wagamama, is not a company that starts trends, but it does take note of them. ‘If it isn’t selling, it’s taken off the menu,’ Gershon says, ‘simple as that. Wetherspoons is nothing if not a very commercial company.’
The introduction of katsu curry at Wetherspoons feels significant, like the dish has been so absorbed into mainstream British gastronomy that it’s no more novel or notable than chicken tikka masala or spaghetti Bolognese. But even as we see the continued rollout of katsu curry everything, it has just about held onto its Japanese cultural odour. Maybe katsu curry doesn’t have to be either/or; maybe it can be Japanese and British.
In 2018, the Japanese curry-rice chain CoCo Ichibanya opened its first UK branch in Leicester Square (its first outside of Asia, Hawaii, and the west coast of the US). Acknowledging the circular path of Japanese curry, CoCo’s website says that the company ‘feels very proud and excited to present our own version of Japanese curry to the UK, where it all started’.
Recent developments suggest that, in the future, katsu curry in the UK may regain some of its Japanese identity. Japanese companies such as Yutaka, Nissin, and Ajinomoto have all launched katsu curry products, and S&B have been selling their iconic Golden Curry roux into British supermarkets since 2021. The All Japan Curry Manufacturers Association (全日本カレー工業協同組合) and the Organisation to Promote Japanese Restaurants Abroad (JRO) are collaborating to actively promote Japanese curry in the UK, holding free tastings at Hyper Japan and a prize draw which can be entered by dining at approved curry restaurants. One of these restaurants is Hiden, a small but celebrated Japanese curry shop with branches in King’s Cross and Stroud Green. Hiden operates with an emphasis on handcrafting, something often prized in other forms of Japanese cookery but not usually applied to curry. Store manager Hiroki Uda says that their sensei, Hide-san, was a highly skilled Japanese chef, ‘a real shokunin’, who blended his own spices and made his curry with a base of properly caramelised onions and a variety of fruits. ‘We tried his recipe and we knew we had to keep using it,’ Uda recalls, explaining how much better it was than the typical ‘Just add water’ curry blocks. An ethos of kodawari (uncompromising attention to detail) has worked as a selling point for other types of Japanese food, sustaining a decades-long high-end sushi trend and three distinct waves of ramen in the UK. But Uda says that a similar kind of success for katsu curry has been hard to grasp, partly because people don’t see it as a refined restaurant product. ‘Even in Japan,’ he says, ‘we go out for things like ramen and sushi, but curry is very much a home-cooked food.’
Of course, it could be that every iteration of katsu curry, including refined Japanese restaurant versions like Hiden’s, will simply become subsumed into the ever-expanding and increasingly messy katsu curry universe. After all, as a British-inspired Japanese dish that’s now becoming a Japanese-inspired British dish, katsu curry is an ouroboros – and an insatiable one. Nothing can escape getting hoovered up in its gaping maw as it chomps away at its own tail. Until earlier this year, katsu curry was something that I was hyper-aware of; I couldn’t avoid it if I tried. There it was, at Sainsbury’s, at Wenzel’s, in burritos, on Detroit pizza with fish (?!?) – everywhere. But now it’s somehow slipped from my consciousness entirely, almost like it’s vanished. Because that’s what happens when something is too common – it’s so omnipresent that it becomes invisible, like the air that we breathe.
Maybe in the near or distant future, you’ll sit down for a katsu curry dinner at Wetherspoons or at Hiden or at a new yōshoku restaurant opened by JKS, and someone will say, ‘Did you know it was originally Japanese?’, or maybe, ‘Did you know it was originally British?’, and you’ll reply, ‘I know!’ – just like you do when someone brings up the origins of chicken tikka masala or fish and chips. The next morning, on the way to work, you’ll grab a katsu curry breakfast bap from Leon, then spend the morning drafting a market research proposal for Chicago Town’s katsu curry deep dish pizza. For lunch, you’ll head to Pret for a katsu curry chicken baguette and a katsu curry chai latte, then return to lead a focus group for Huel katsu curry macaroni pots. Back at home, you’ll make Pinch of Nom’s air fryer sweet potato katsu curry for dinner (delicious), then relax with a katsu-scented candle while watching Rick Stein’s Katsu Curry Crash Course on BBC Two. You’ll feed your cat a pouch of Whiskas ‘Catsu Curry’ Poultry Feast, apply The Body Shop’s Coconut Katsu Curry Face Mask with Exfoliating Coriander Seed, then go to sleep. Perchance to dream of katsu curry.
Credits
Tim Anderson is a Wisconsin-born chef and author who has pursued an interest in Japanese food for more than two decades. After relocating to London in 2008, he went on to win MasterChef on BBC1, and he has since written eight books on Japanese cookery, including Ramen Forever, Your Home Izakaya, and the upcoming Hokkaido.
Sinjin Li is the moniker of Sing Yun Lee, an illustrator and graphic designer based in Essex. Sing uses the character of Sinjin Li to explore ideas found in science fiction, fantasy, and folklore. They like to incorporate elements of this thinking in their commissioned work, creating illustrations and designs for subject matter including cultural heritage and belief, food and poetry, among many other themes. They can be found at www.sinjinli.com and on Instagram at @sinjin_li.
The full Vittles masthead can be found here.
Special thanks to Kirstie Sobue, Fliss Freeborn, and Dr Annie Gray for their insights.
Shocked that there was no mention of the chef who wrote the first katsu curry recipe in the uk??
I didn’t know I was so on trend with my love of katsu curry - or, that when I ate it every lunch in Japan for two months after uni, there was maybe a reason it was such a comfort food for me as a homesick Brit