Wagamama Chicken Katsu Curry

Wagamama chicken katsu curry costs £15.30 and carries 988 kcal, and it is the dish most people walk through the door for. Panko chicken comes sliced over sticky white rice under katsu curry sauce, with a dressed salad and pickles alongside. Katsu means cutlet: a chicken breast rolled in panko, the coarse Japanese breadcrumb that fries into an open, shattering crust rather than the dense shell ordinary crumbs give.

The sauce is the reason the dish took over the country. Mild, fruity and lightly sweet, it reads closer to a Japanese curry house sauce than anything from an Indian menu, and it lands thick enough to cling to every slice. Order of operations matters when you eat it: keep the cutlet above the sauce line and the crust stays noisy to the last piece; drown it and the panko goes quiet in minutes. The pickles pull the same weight lemon pulls with schnitzel, cutting the fried richness so the final forkful tastes as good as the first, and the dressed salad keeps the plate from reading beige all the way through.

The chicken katsu curry calories surprise almost everyone: 988 kcal makes this the lightest curry wagamama serves, just under half of a 2,000 kcal day and a long way below the vegan yasai katsu curry, because a chicken breast sheds oil in the fryer while panko vegetables drink it. Protein is strong at around 44 g, and salt sits just under 3 g, less than half of the 6 g the NHS suggests for a full day and the lowest figure in the curry section. The allergen sheet lists gluten, wheat, eggs, mustard and soya, and there is no gluten free marking on this plate; the raisukaree and firecracker dishes are where wagamama marks its gluten free curries.

Anyone asking how much is the chicken katsu curry at wagamama should treat £15.30 as the standard figure, with central London, airport and station sites a touch higher and the menu board on the day as the final word. The hot chicken katsu curry is the same cutlet under a spicier sauce for anyone who finds the classic too polite. Start with duck gyoza if you are sharing, and a cherry blossom lemonade cuts through the fried coating far better than a cola manages.