Press and media

Of the 1731 U.S. restaurants in this directory that advertise Wagyu on their own current menus, 405 publish enough detail to identify what they are selling: a Japanese brand with its prefecture and grade, an American breed status with the ranch named, or an Australian producer with a marbling score. The remaining 1326 advertise Wagyu and say nothing further. That is a documentation gap rather than an accusation, and it is the clearest available measure of how much information the word carries on an American menu. The full report sets out the method and the limits.

Each of these regenerates from the live database, so quote them with the date attached. As of August 26, 2026:

Coverage spans 50 states and the District of Columbia. Kobe by state breaks the registry figures down state by state.

The most useful thing a directory like this can offer a reporter is a clear account of its own limits, so here are ours in advance of being asked.

• These counts are a floor, not a census.They describe venues we list. More American restaurants advertise Wagyu than this directory has catalogued, and nobody knows how many. Any sentence of the form “there are N Wagyu restaurants in America” is one we cannot support.
• We do not test meat. There is no lab, no tasting panel and no site visit behind any listing. We read what a seller publishes and record how specific it is.
• Menu claim only is not fraud. It means the provenance is not published. Many of those venues are almost certainly sourcing exactly what they say.
• Kobe registry status is not menu availability.We publish the two as separate numbers because they are separate facts, and the gap between them is real. The association’s own U.S. restaurant list stood at 145 as of July 16, 2026; the figure above is how many of those this directory publishes, which is lower.
• Verification is AI-assisted.Listings are checked by automated agents reading first-party sources, with the evidence stored and quoted on each listing’s page so any conclusion can be walked back to its source.

The charts on the report and on Kobe by state are rendered from live data and may be screenshotted and reproduced with attribution to WagyuSpot and the date. If you need a chart at a specific size, a different cut of the data, or the underlying state-level table in a spreadsheet, email us and we will send it.

Brian Fralick, founder of WagyuSpot, which verifies every Wagyu listing against the seller's own first-party material. Reach us at wagyuspot@proton.me. We answer press email quickly, and we are glad to be told we have something wrong: corrections are logged against the listing they affect.

Background reading: how we verify, about, and how Wagyu claims go wrong.