A Fire Shuts Down One of the Bay Area’s Best Tonkatsu Restaurants

A late-night fire at a downtown Danville strip mall has shut down one of the Bay Area’s top restaurants specializing in tonkatsu, or Japanese-style fried pork cutlets.

Jungdon Katsu first opened mid-pandemic in 2022 as a tiny ghost kitchen takeout operation in Emeryville. Almost immediately, the shop’s juicy, preternaturally crunchy pork cutlets gained a loyal following — the San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Cesar Hernandez called them “exceptional and satisfying” in a rave review. Last year, owner Joyce Kim opened the larger, sit-down version of the restaurant in Danville, sharing a space with Taru Sushi, the sushi spot she’d run at that location with a business partner since 2016.

Jungdon and Taru were two of the several businesses that closed indefinitely after the Oct. 20 fire. Reached by phone, Nicole Kim, the owner’s daughter, tells KQED it’s unclear whether the Danville restaurant will ever be able to reopen. Even though the Jungdon space wasn’t caught in the blaze, the whole building suffered so much structural damage that there’s no way for customers to safely enter the restaurant.

“Luckily, no one got hurt,” Kim says. “It just feels really weird because my mom worked really, really hard to get to this point [for it to be lost], all because of this stupid fire.”

For now, she says, her mother is trying to stay positive. Even before the fire, the Kims had already started working on building out a new full-fledged restaurant in Emeryville, at 6485 Hollis St. — a process they’re now trying to fast-track so they can open in the next month or two. Kim has also started a GoFundMe campaign to help tide the business over during this transition — and, especially, to support workers at the Danville restaurant who now likely have to find new jobs.

In the meantime, Jungdon fans can get their fix at the Emeryville ghost kitchen location, which remains open for takeout.

Jungdon serves several varieties of breaded deep-fried meat, including menchi katsu (made with ground pork) and chicken katsu. But the pork katsu is the dish that made it a destination restaurant, with long lines out the door nearly every night at the Danville sit-down location.

You can find tonkatsu on the menu at most all-purpose Japanese restaurants, and the fried pork cutlets feature prominently at curry shops and casual cafes, where they’re often served in sandwich form. But specialized katsu shops that serve the fried cutlets the way they do in Japan — piping hot on a wire rack, with a mound of thinly shredded cabbage on the side — are extremely rare in the Bay Area. In the East Bay, in particular, Jungdon Katsu was basically one of one.

During dinner service, the elder Kim would pound and bread each batch of katsu to order, using fresh panko breadcrumbs to make the shaggy breading puff out outrageously. For dine-in customers, the percussive thud-thud-thud of Kim pounding each pork cutlet into tender submission made for a comforting soundtrack to the meal.

Kim first fell in love with pork katsu in her native Korea, and at the new Emeryville location, she’s working on adding a thinner, sauce-soaked version of the dish to the menu — what Koreans call “old-fashioned katsu.”

Nicole Kim, the daughter, says the family is hoping for the best as far as reopening the Danville restaurant is concerned. If that proves to be impossible, they’ll explore the possibility of opening a new location closer to that part of the East Bay, perhaps in Dublin.