Join us as we attempt to eat this pork cutlet bowl first thing in the morning.

If you were to run off a list of popular Japanese foods, katsudon would be high among them. However, in terms of common Japanese breakfast foods, katsudon wouldn’t rate a mention, as a rice bowl topped with a deep-fried pork cutlet is quite a hefty meal usually enjoyed later in the day.

Katsudon restaurant chain Katsuya now wants to change all that, though, employing a combo commonly associated with breakfast, bacon and fried eggs, to encourage us to view the pork cutlet rice bowl in a whole new light.

▼ Katusya

They’ve created the Bacon Egg Sauce Katsudon, offering it in the style of an all-day breakfast, available from the time of opening. The massive meal is priced at 690 yen (US$5), and it’s also available as a Teishoku Set, with miso soup, and rice on the side instead of in the bowl, for 790 yen.

Katsuya says the new menu item is “like breakfast”, but honestly, this is a breakfast combo we’ve never seen before. This was a whole lot of food to start the day on, but our reporter Ahiruneko was up for the challenge, arriving with an empty stomach shortly after his local branch opened for the day.

Katsudon and egg are common bedfellows, as eggs are usually scrambled with onions in the regular version of the dish. Here, though, the egg is fried, with a yolk that’s…

▼ …beautifully soft and runny.

Ahiruneko likes a good runny egg, so his taste expectations began to run high for this meal. But first, let’s take a closer look at what he’ll be eating for breakfast today, shall we?

▼ Bacon and egg…

▼ …and a full serving of breaded, fried pork cutlet!

The amount of katsudon in this meal was a bit of a shock to Ahiruneko’s system, so he carefully replaced the bacon and egg topping in an attempt to forget the giant piece of pork behind it all.

It was going to be a steep hill to climb, so he started with the more familiar bacon and eggs.

Katsuya might specialise in katsudon, but they sure know how to fry up some tasty egg and bacon. Ahiruneko’s only criticism here was that there could’ve been another egg, to better match the amount of pork in the dish, because before he knew it, he’d finished the topping and was now left with a regular katsudon underneath.

In hindsight, he probably should’ve tried some of the fried pork with the egg, but the bowl was so full and the egg so runny it was hard to manoeuvre around all the contents without making a mess.

At this point, Ahiruneko wondered if he’d dreamed up the egg and bacon, seeing as the rest of the meal now looked like a regular Katsuya katsudon. However, his stomach was quick to remind him that it wasn’t a dream, because as he ate the pork cutlet, he quickly became much fuller than usual. 

▼ “I will…get through…this breakfast…”

Ahiruneko finally managed to finish every morsel of his massive breakfast, and by the end of it all, he was totally stuffed, in a good way. Katsudon and fried bacon and eggs is a great combination he recommends trying if you can, although he’s not sure whether he’ll ever have it for breakfast again.

It was a great dining experience, but personally, he’ll be sticking to one of these more common Japanese breakfasts in future.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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