Ton Shou Premium Katsu & Izakaya – Vegas

Ton Shou Premium Katsu & Izakaya specializes in katsu – Japanese breaded cutlets (usually chicken or pork). Ton Shou is located on Spring Mountain, the amazing miles-upon-miles road representing Vegas’s Chinatown, filled with amazing restaurants. I decided to try it for lunch one day. You can make an RSVP online using Google’s assistant. I am not sure exactly how this works as the restaurant LOOKS like it has an online RSVP system, but when you fill out the form to create an RSVP, it tells you that Google assistant will attempt to contact the restaurant and make it for you. It looks like the form creates a request, and then Google has a bot or some AI tool which contacts the restaurant to make the actual RSVP for you. In any event, the process worked and I got a confirmation within a few minutes (both by text and email).

Shortly after ordering, our server brought us a free appetizer – tuna tartare. It was a very nice surprise. Taste wise, it was good though I would not order it again here.

We started with the pork katsu sando. It huge and enough for two people to share. It was filled with the cutlet, katsu sauce, a kind of coleslaw, and egg salad. Not the best sando I’ve had, but pretty good. Would not order again though. The bread was a matcha bread. My benchmark for sando is this food truck in Vancouver.

For our main, the pork loin katsu and a side of curry.

My benchmark for this dish is Saku in Vancouver. The composition of the meal is almost identical at both places, but on salad, soup and katsu, Saku wins hands down. However, as a stand alone, Ton Shou is still REALLY good and I would recommend this place if you are craving this type of food. Just like Saku, I ordered another bowl of soup at Ton and they didn’t charge for it so I assume you can order as much soup (and maybe salad) as you want, though no one told us. Service was as expected for a casual place.