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The story
A post opening with “We recently received quite a harsh review on Tabelog” — which names the exact visit date and, in poem-like prose, calls on the customer to “come back someday” — has become a hot topic on 5ch’s Livegalileo board. The shop believed to be behind the post is “Niban-tei,” known for its katsu curry (2,299 yen, tax included). The thread spiraled into debate over the restaurant’s policy of serving the pork cutlet uncut, complaints about the meat’s smell, and even whether katsu and curry really belong together at all.
What people said
I remember this customer clearly.
Dinner on Friday, October 9th, right?
That's fine by me.
'I don't think I'll be returning.'
Notice how even they hedged with 'I think.'
Living and dying by today's reviews, coughing up blood, I'll keep building tomorrow's worth.
Someday I'll make them write, 'I swore I'd never go back, but somehow I ended up there again.'
All the frustration, all the anger — it all goes into the curry.
That's Niban-tei's secret ingredient.
Japanese curry still has more to give.
You really need to cut the cutlet.
Giving this ★3 is actually a pretty generous score.
Facts. A 3.5 already puts you in the top few percent, so it's not low at all.
Agreed. The best pairing for curry is a crab cream croquette.
The meat's basically rotten, so the rating itself is being way too generous.
Probably just that cutting it made it hard to arrange nicely on top of the rice, or something like that.
Fair enough. But anyone who wants katsu curry is definitely going to dunk the cutlet straight into the curry anyway, so what's the point of keeping it perched up on the rice?
Some people eat the katsu in katsu curry with sauce on it instead, you know.
What's with the name?
The name alone is a -2. So 3 is basically the max score.
So the smelly meat turns out to be kakuni (braised pork belly)? For it to still smell even after going into curry, that's saying something.
I'd rather eat this one.
Was this a ramen shop before? Looks like they're just using the old setup as-is.
Of course people get mad when food comes out with zero thought for the person eating it.
That'd be CoCo Ichibanya's katsu curry.
Background and Key Points of the Debate
Tabelog scores tend to run generous, and even a rating in the high 3s can place a restaurant near the top of the rankings (as one poster in the thread pointed out, “a 3.5 already puts you in the top few percent”). That means a “★3” isn’t necessarily a low score, which made the owner’s clapback look a bit over-the-top to some. Opinions in the thread split over whether the real issue was “the harshness of the review” or “the policy of serving the cutlet uncut” — on the latter point, a photo of the shop’s stated policy was posted, with some suggesting it was a deliberate service design choice. That said, the article itself can’t confirm the actual review text or the rating screenshot, since the main source is what can be inferred from the owner’s own post. Opinions were also split on the price (2,299 yen) — whether that’s expensive or reasonable for curry — reflecting differing perceptions amid broader price hikes across the dining-out industry.
※This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Livegalileo) thread “Owner whose confident katsu curry got a 3-star review fires back with a poem“.
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