WAGYUMAN

Most American sellers of Japanese Wagyu carry the famous names: Miyazaki, Kagoshima, sometimes Hokkaido. WAGYUMAN's programmes have run to the edges of that map instead, with Bushu Wagyu from Saitama, north of Tokyo, and Takamori Drunken Wagyu from Yamaguchi at the far west of Honshu.

Both are real regional brands with small outputs, and both are close to invisible in the United States. That is the argument for this kind of importer: a shop with two programmes it can name in full is offering something a broad catalogue of unattributed A5 cannot, which is beef you can identify rather than beef you can only grade.

Its Saitama programme has been sold with the farm named, a family operation, alongside the A5 grade and a marbling score in the top band. Brand plus prefecture plus farm plus grade is the full set, and it is the standard this directory treats as provenance-transparent for Japanese beef. Very few sellers reach it.

The Yamaguchi programme's name is not a flourish either. Takamori's cattle are fed sake lees, the residue left after rice wine is pressed, which is a traditional Japanese finishing practice in the same family as the olive pomace used in Kagawa and the grape pomace used by one Hyogo producer. Feeding a by-product of a local drinks industry is an old idea in Japanese cattle raising and it is where several of the country's distinctive regional brands come from.

This seller's range has shifted before, and an importer of small-production Japanese brands is by nature exposed to what its partners can supply. Check the current listing rather than any description of the catalogue, including this one.

What travels is the disclosure standard. A shop that has named its farms and prefectures once has shown it can, and that is the thing to hold it to on whatever it is selling now.