Katsuya Konosuke

For years this spot near the Asakusa View Hotel belonged to Tonkatsu Kappo Akiyama, whose owner had spent a career as a Tsukiji middleman and chose his pork the way he once judged fish. He retired in his late seventies and the shutters came down. In February 2026 a much younger cook took over the room, kept the counter, and began frying something Akiyama never served: tonkatsu with a black crust.

The color comes from ground black sesame worked into the crumb by a method the shop declines to explain. Order without saying anything and the black version is what arrives. A standard breading exists for the cautious.

The kitchen gives away almost nothing while you wait. There is no roar of oil, because the frying runs low and slow, and the cutlet takes its time. The pork is domestic, mild, and comes out moist. The crust is the loud part. It doesn't crackle so much as crack, a hard, roasted bite that divides opinion at the counter: on the loin it can shout over the meat, which is gentle by design. On the fillet, where the crumb runs finer, the balance lands. If you order one thing here, order the hire.

The rest of the tray shows the same restless streak. The opener is a tamagoyaki steeped in dashi, served in a small lidded bowl with a pinch of chili. The cabbage is cut with red cabbage and reads faintly sweet. Two sauces come standard, and the house pairing is the sweet grated-daikon Worcester, which does more for the black crust than salt ever will. The soup is a clear pork suimono rather than miso, rare enough that one Tokyo critic, close to three hundred tonkatsu shops into his career, wrote that he had never once seen it before. And for tables that arrive hungry there is the T-bone: a 500-gram bone-in cut the menu calls the Tomahawk, ¥5,900.

The rice is Chiba Koshihikari and treated with respect. By eight in the evening most seats are travelers, which is what Asakusa is now, and the counter handles it without fuss. Ten minutes from Senso-ji, one minute from the Tsukuba Express exit, and closed on Wednesdays.