Meatluxe Hawaii

This seller delivers locally on Oahu and interisland within Hawaii, and states plainly that it does not send orders to the mainland. Free home delivery runs inside a short radius of its Waipahu warehouse.

For most readers of this directory that settles it, and it is why the restriction is at the top rather than buried at the bottom. For anyone in Hawaii it is the opposite of a limitation: this is one of the most specifically described Japanese Wagyu catalogues in the country and it is on your island.

Almost every Japanese item here carries its prefecture and its grade in the title itself, usually with a marbling number attached. Not a spec table further down the page, not a paragraph of prose: the title.

That sounds like a small design decision and it changes what a shopper can do. When the name reads as a region, a grade and a marbling score, two products can be compared at a glance and neither can hide behind the word Wagyu. It is the single most useful thing a Japanese Wagyu seller can do and almost nobody does it.

The range reaches well past the familiar names. Satsuma-Gyu is the Kagoshima brand; Bushu Samurai Beef comes from Saitama, north of Tokyo; Tokachi Poroshiri is a Hokkaido programme named for a peak in the Hidaka range. Alongside them sit Miyazaki and Kumamoto, including a Kumamoto Akaushi striploin, which is Japanese Brown rather than Japanese Black and eats quite differently.

Carrying an Akaushi cut at a lower grade beside a wall of A5 is a deliberate choice worth noticing. It is a leaner, beefier animal, and a shop that stocks it is offering variety rather than only altitude. Its Australian and American lines are named to producers on the same principle.