Wagyu restaurants in Massachusetts

Forty-nine Massachusetts restaurants publish here and sixteen clear the full sourcing standard, with thirty-three resting on a menu claim. All sixteen document Japanese beef and not one documents American, which for a state with this much steakhouse tradition is a real surprise. The thirty-three menu-claim listings are a different picture again: venues advertising Wagyu on their own current menus without publishing a prefecture, a grade, a breed status or a producer. They are listed here rather than hidden, because leaving them out would make the state look tidier than it is.

The rooms themselves lean Japanese, and lean harder every time the state is swept. Thirteen of the sixteen are Japanese restaurants rather than steakhouses, among them a sushi counter, a hand-roll bar, a washoku room and a room serving shabu, and only two call themselves a steakhouse plainly. Boston holds seven of the sixteen and Everett two, the Everett pair sharing a single address.

One restaurant group accounts for five of them. JP Fuji Group runs six rooms across the metro and five of the six document an award-winning Miyazaki A5 clay pot, in Somerville, Quincy, the South End, Kendall Square and Newtonville. The sixth, on High Street in Boston, serves no beef at all, which is why each was read on its own menu rather than on the group's reputation. Where a group runs one sourcing programme the documentation usually travels with it; here it travels to five rooms out of six, and the exception is the useful part.

One Massachusetts room holds a Kobe registry licence and one was serving Kobe when we last looked. That is the entire Kobe picture in the state, which is worth carrying around given how freely the word gets used in the region's marketing.

Where these kitchens do name a producer they reach a long way for it: Stone Axe from the New South Wales high country at one steakhouse, Toriyama Farms at a hand-roll bar, and a Kusunoki farm citation at the only top-tier room in the state. The striploin is the cut named most often, ahead of the ribeye.