Order a katsudon in Niigata and you will not get egg. What arrives is thin cutlets, fried and then dipped whole into a sweet-salty soy sauce tare, laid straight onto rice. No onion, no simmering, no beaten egg holding it all together. The dish is subtraction rather than addition, and locals simply call it tare katsu.

The shop credited with it is Tonkatsu Taro in the Furumachi district of Niigata city, which began serving it in the early Showa years. The first-generation owner, Komatsu Michitaro, worked out the form. The tare itself has been topped up and carried forward since the 1950s, the way an eel restaurant keeps its sauce, so what goes on a cutlet today has some continuity with what went on one seventy years ago.

A standard bowl carries five cutlets. The special carries seven. They are cut thin enough that the count sounds more alarming than it eats, and they overlap across the rice like roof tiles.

What I keep noticing is the consequence of leaving the egg out. In an ordinary katsudon everything merges into one soft layer. Here nothing merges. There is fried crust, there is sauce soaked into it, and underneath there is white rice, still recognizably white. The boundary stays where it was.