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After a brief refurb in the autumn of 2012, Japanese restaurant Satsuma has been relaunched – yet again - with an updated look (the streamlined 'pod' style booths, put in only a year before in 2011, have been removed and replaced with shared tables). The menu still specialising in katsu – a general term referring to food that is breadcrumbed and deep-fried.
There are straightforward katsu sets (featuring the usual chicken, pork cutlet, prawn and oyster), served with steamed rice and a suribachi – which is a kind of Japanese mortar and pestle used for grinding your own sesame seeds into a powder for use as a dip or garnish. There are also bowls of katsu curries.
Our pork katsu curry looked decent, the cutlet with its attractive golden-brown hue, but the panko (Japanese breadcrumb) coating could have been lighter; the pork itself was rather dry, remedied only slightly by the accompanying velvety curry sauce.
A half-hearted sprinkling of tiny chopped pickles was superfluous, but we liked the well-cooked Japanese short-grain rice. Not too bad for what is essentially a one-plate meal – but it’s still far from the quality experience you might reasonably expect from a katsu 'specialist'.