Wagyu restaurants in Seattle, Washington

Seattle buys its Wagyu the way a butcher would. Forty-five of its restaurants publish here and seven clear the full sourcing standard, and two of those seven run a butcher counter alongside the dining room. Zero hold a licence on the official Kobe Beef Association registry and none carries a registry-backed badge, so every room here reaches the standard on documented sourcing.

The counter is not decoration. A restaurant that also sells raw beef has to buy whole primals rather than portioned steaks, which means someone on the premises is breaking down the animal and deciding what each part becomes. That shows up on the menus: zabuton appears on two of the seven, karubi on another, and cuts like those exist only if somebody is cutting rather than ordering.

One of the seven names a ranch in Idaho that keeps no website at all. That is a genuinely useful kind of citation, because the ranch has no marketing to be quoted from and no reason to be named except that it is the actual source. Its cattle finish in Texas for a well-known Akaushi programme, and it is listed on this site, so a diner can follow a menu line to a real operation that has never tried to sell them anything.

Three of the seven sit below the top price tier, including a Korean barbecue room with a butcher counter, so this is not a city where documented Wagyu is confined to the expensive end. The thirty-eight remaining published venues advertise Wagyu without documenting its origin, and are listed separately below.