Many people at our Japanese restaurant in Seattle like to start their sushi meal by pouring out a small pool of soy sauce for easy dipping. This is an acceptable practice here in the United States, but you would do well to leave it behind if you ever made your way across the ocean to a sushi restaurant in Japan. It is here that wasting soy sauce is considered very bad form.

Soy sauce is an important condiment to the Japanese, so ending a meal with leftover soy sauce is frowned upon. Try to only pour out a small amount so that you never take much more than you use. Further, most of your sushi shouldn’t require much in the way of condiments in the first place.

Classic Favorite Japanese Cuisine

Tonkatsu is a familiar friend for many diners at I Love Sushi’s Seattle restaurant. It’s a classic favorite for many first-timers to Japanese food, boasting a taste that appeals quite readily to the tastes of the average American. And indeed, this is no mistake, for the origins of the dish actually lie in one of Japan’s earliest attempts at Japanese-Western fusion cuisine.

Tonkatsu is thought to have been first served at some time around 1890 in Ginza, Japan. Though the details are difficult to be certain about, it is thought that there was a restaurant in the region that specialized in preparing food inspired by European cooking techniques.

Though the idea of “katsu” was by no means new to Japan, the deep-fried “tonkatsu” was a fresh innovation. The original tonkatsu dishes were actually served with a fork instead of a pair of chopsticks, which was almost entirely unheard of in Japan at the time!