Wagyu restaurants in Pennsylvania

Sixty Pennsylvania restaurants publish here and fifteen clear the full sourcing standard, with forty-five resting on a menu claim. Eight of the fifteen are in Philadelphia and the rest are scattered one apiece across Pittsburgh, Wexford, Lititz, Hermitage, Conshohocken, Bryn Mawr and Wayne, a wider spread than the verified count suggests.

Three Pennsylvania rooms hold a Kobe registry licence and three were serving Kobe when we last looked. Full conversion on three rooms is a small sample rather than a boast, but it does mean that in this state the word on the menu and the licence behind it have so far always agreed.

Pennsylvania is the only state with nine or more verified rooms where not one verified menu documents Australian Wagyu. Fourteen of the fifteen document Japanese beef and one documents American, so the conversation here is almost entirely about imports from Japan, with a little about domestic ranches. Australian beef is not quite absent from the state, though it never reaches the verified tier: two menu-claim rooms name it, and one of them, an Italian kitchen on North Broad Street, names Westholme on its steak tagliata, which is a producer rather than a bare country.

Philadelphia's contribution is format rather than volume. Alongside its steakhouses the city carries a shabu counter and a nori room, both from the same Chubby Cattle group, a contemporary Japanese dining room, and a Malaysian kitchen that is one of only four rooms in the state reaching the top tier. Outside the city the pattern reverts to type: a chophouse in Lititz, a chophouse and cigar bar north of Pittsburgh, and a restaurant in a Hermitage park that names a Wagyu cattle ranch as its source.