Tonkatsu Hinata

A pork cutlet is breadcrumbs, pork and oil, and there is nowhere to hide. Four things separate a cutlet worth crossing Tokyo for from the one in a station food court.

The pork. Serious shops buy named breeds from named farms and change supplier with the season, and they will tell you which pork is on if you ask. The fat is the point: a good loin cutlet has a clean white seam of fat along one edge that should taste sweet rather than greasy.

The crumb. Fresh, coarse, hand-torn panko rather than the fine dry commercial kind. It should sit on the meat as a distinct layer, not fuse to it, and it should shatter rather than crunch.

The frying. Low and slow, often twice, at a lower temperature than instinct suggests, so that the interior cooks to the point where the pork is just set and still pink-tinged while the crust stays pale gold. Rushing this gives you a brown crust and a dry interior, which is what most tonkatsu is.

The rest. A fried cutlet needs to sit before it is cut, or the juices run out onto the plate. If your cutlet arrives promptly and perfectly dry beneath, someone is doing this right.

The two cuts are rosu, the loin, with the fat seam, and hire, the fillet, lean and finer-grained. Rosu is the one to order if you want to taste why people care about tonkatsu; hire is the better choice if fat bothers you. Some counters offer both in one set, which is the diplomatic answer.

It comes as a teishoku: cutlet, a mound of finely shredded raw cabbage, rice, miso soup and pickles. The cabbage refill is usually free and asking for one is entirely normal. It is not garnish; the raw cabbage is there to cut the fat and it does.

On the table there will be a pot of thick brown tonkatsu sauce, and often a small mortar of sesame seeds to grind before you pour the sauce in. There may also be salt, and at a shop of this level the correct move is to try the first piece with salt only. The sauce is good and it is also a mask; the salt tells you what the pork actually tastes like.

Mustard on the side is karashi, and it is considerably hotter than it looks. A small amount on one corner of a slice is enough.

Expect a queue and expect no reservations. Counters like this seat a dozen or so, turn over quickly, and manage demand with a line rather than a booking system. The lunch peak is the worst time and the edges of a service are the best.

Bring cash. Many small Tokyo counters take cards now, but the ones that do not are exactly this kind, and it is not a situation you want to discover at the end of a meal.

Takadanobaba is a student district built around Waseda University, which keeps prices down across the whole neighbourhood and makes it a good place to eat generally. It is four stops from Shinjuku on the Yamanote Line, which makes this a workable lunch before an evening in Golden Gai. For the other Bib Gourmand counters here see Nakiryu and Tamawarai.