Wagyu restaurants in Los Angeles, California

Read this list as one part of a region rather than as the whole of it. Twenty restaurants publish under the city of Los Angeles and five clear the full sourcing standard, but the Wagyu in this metro is spread across separate hubs on this site: Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and West Hollywood each carry their own, and so do Irvine and Newport Beach further south. A count drawn at the city line is not a count for the region, and in Los Angeles the city line is doing more work than usual.

What is here is emphatically Japanese in format. Four of the five verified rooms serve Wagyu the Japanese way rather than as a steak: two run an omakase, two serve it as shabu-shabu, and one grills it as yakiniku with an all-you-can-eat service. Only one is a steakhouse in the American sense. That is close to the inverse of Dallas or Nashville, and it means the decision here is which preparation you want rather than which room does the same thing best.

The sourcing is unusually specific for a list this size. One room names a farm in Gunma Prefecture and a California ranch on the same menu, and the steakhouse names a Hyogo producer, an Australian brand and an American one separately. Two of the five hold a licence on the official Kobe Beef Association registry and one carries the Certified Kobe badge, which needs the licence and Kobe on the menu we verified.

One of the five sits below the top price tier, and it happens to be the yakiniku room, which is the pattern seen elsewhere: sliced thin and grilled at the table, a small quantity of highly marbled beef stretches much further than it does as a steak. The fifteen remaining published venues advertise Wagyu without documenting its origin, and are listed separately below.