On a recent return trip to Volcano, I found that a lot had changed. The curry didn't taste that much different, but it was all arranged properly, on real dinnerware with metal utensils. It made the experience so much better that I felt Volcano needed to be re-rated. I'd actually recommend it to people, now.

(Unfortunately, the cheese is still placed on top of the katsu and not in the sauce, which isn't really where it's supposed to go.)

While I've left our original review intact -- you can't erase the Internet any more than you can unring a bell -- I've changed it from a "2" to a "3".

If you Americurry readers ever think we should go back and re-review a restaurant's curry because significant changes have been made, for good or for ill, please let us know!

The best you could hope for with "restaurant curry" is that it would be unobjectionable. It would never be in the same league as Go Go or CoCo.

On a recent all-day excursion to Japantown -- we're pretty much seeing every movie at the luxurious Sundance Kabuki, these days -- Karen and I tried the curry rice at two different places we'd never been to before: Bushi-Tei Bistro and Sanppo Sushi.

Bushi-Tei Bistro is a recently-opened sister restaurant to Bushi-Tei, the Michelin star-rated fine dining French/California fusion restaurant up the street. The casual bistro features a wholly different menu, mostly made up of rice and pasta dishes borrowing from Japanese and Italian cuisine.

We'd hoped the restaurant's high standards would carry over and create something more than the usual lunch-counter curry, but they did not. The best thing about the pork katsu curry ($12.80) is that it is topped with a kurobuta pork cutlet, thick, juicy, and perfectly fried. Unfortunately, the curry sauce itself was way too salty, making the whole dish disappointing.

You can also get your curry plain, or topped with two large fried shrimp. But as appetizing as it looks on the picture-menu outside the restaurant, we weren't impressed at all with the final product. (Not to mention the fact that it took a really long time.)

Sanppo Sushi's curry was similar -- no frills, just rice, sauce, katsu, deep red fukujinzuke pickles, and a couple of cocktail onions. (Does anyone actually eat those...?) It was served, hilariously, in a gigantic deep ramen bowl, which made eating it a bit awkward.

But the sauce, for restaurant curry, was actually pretty good -- even though the thin, dark-meat katsu was a disappointment, especially after Bushi-Tei's kurobuta. I'm usually opposed on principle to giant chunks of vegetable in my curry -- especially when it's something like Manpuku where you can't find the curry for all the potatoes. But Sanppo's chunks of stewed carrot were small enough and well-cooked enough that it didn't bother me.

We did make an interesting discovery, though. I noticed that the menu listed "beef curry" and "katsu curry," both priced at $10. I got the katsu, and Karen's husband Patrick ordered the beef curry. But I noticed that my curry also had chunks of beef in the sauce, and I didn't see any difference between mine and his. So if you order "beef curry" at Sanppo, you're getting ripped off -- it's katsu curry, with no katsu, for the same price.

If all I had ever eaten was "restaurant curry," I'd be of the opinion that Japanese curry is an interesting, though ultimately underwhelming, food. I wouldn't understand its greatness, and we certainly wouldn't have started a website about it. Sadly, this is often the only option for anyone looking to try Japanese curry in America. I don't think I'd order the curry at either place again, although Sanppo's gets the edge in this impromptu battle.

New People, a new center for Japanese pop culture to be opened in San Francisco's Japantown, will feature food from local curry maker Delica rf-1.

While New People currently says that it will get fresh daily deliveries of "bento boxes" from the Japanese deli, it doesn't specifically mention whether any of those will contain curry rice. But we can dream, right?

(Read Americurry's review of Delica rf-1.)

New People is the brainchild of Viz Media founder Seiji Horibuchi, bankrolled by a $15 million investment courtesy Japanese comic publisher Shogakukan. (I'm fairly certain the name comes from the Japanese phrase shinjinrui, their term for "Generation X.")

The four-floor building will have a theater for screening J-pop films, stores selling all things Japanese, and fashion boutiques from Harajuku. It will open on August 15.

(Image: Viz Media)

is likely to be the first thing a curry fan will exclaim at being served the katsu curry plate at On the Bridge, a small, popular eatery in San Francisco's Japantown.

There are, in fact, some people who love having their curry topped with fried eggs, as evidenced by the fact that the topping is available in Japan's CoCo Ichibanya curry chain. But getting surprised with a massive topping that's not on the menu, especially if you don't like fried eggs, is a scary experience. My katsu curry at On the Bridge even had diced tomatoes and grated Parmesean cheese on it, for some reason.

Why all the surprise bizarro toppings? Well, it's because On the Bridge specializes in what it calls yoshokuya dishes, which is Japanese for "Western style." It's fusion cuisine that combines Eastern and Western flavors. So you can get all manner of pasta with Japanese toppings, or curry with "American" toppings that you'd find on a pizza. (And yes, they do in fact serve curry pizza.)

But whereas most fusion food consists of flavors from different cuisines delicately stitched together, On the Bridge's fusion is the equivalent of a train full of Japanese food and a train full of American food smashing together in a full-speed head-on collision. Pick up the wreckage and you'll have their katsu curry. It is, to understate the case, an inelegant combination.

And yet I can't totally dismiss On the Bridge's food. On the one hand, I love curry places that offer a lot of customization options, and On the Bridge has the most of any San Francisco place I've ever seen. You can start with a basic curry plate for about $6, then choose from a large menu of different toppings to add to it, including tons of different vegetables. You can pick from six different spiciness levels.

Oddly enough, if you want katsu, and of course you do, you need to look elsewhere on the overly complicated menu. Way down the list, in the "Over Rice" section, it lists "Katsu Curry Don." They even have beef katsu, which I've rarely seen outside Japan. I ordered the pork Katsu Curry Don ($10.25) with shredded cheese.

You know what happened next. I had to push a fried egg off my plate. The cheese was served in a little separate dish, and I put it right on the curry, which had been liberated from its egg-based torment. The curry sauce was quite warm, and the cheese immediately began to melt in. I have to say, once I got past the egg, the dish was piping hot and good -- it felt like serious comfort food. The little tomato pieces didn't change the flavor that much, but the Parmesan made it taste weird. At least they sprinkled it off to the side instead of all over the curry sauce.

The curry sauce itself was decent, albeit with kind of an off taste to it -- although that might have been because of the other ingredients. There wasn't a lot of sauce: just enough to cover the katsu, leaving all the rice underneath white and bare.

If you're in Japantown and you want to stop by On the Bridge -- and you might be tempted, since it's a charming little place with Studio Ghibli anime playing on the three TV sets and shelves full of manga for you to read while you eat -- try the katsu curry, but remember to ask them to leave off the fried egg, tomatoes, and grated cheese if you don't want them.

Muracci's says it simmers its curry for two days. I have no way of proving that, but I believe it: Their sauce is rich and light brown, with a taste reminiscent of Japan's CoCo Ichibanya. There's only one size, but it's pretty substantial -- and you can order more rice and curry sauce if you want to. A little bit of fukujinzuke and pickled cabbage sit on the side of the plate. There are three spice levels, which might not be enough for adventure-seekers, although Medium was plenty for me.

The tonkatsu was fantastic. It was surprisingly large, a juicy and thick slab of fried pork that was a welcome change from the tough, thin slices I'd gotten used to at too many Japanese restaurants in America.

Muracci's doesn't offer cheese on its curry, which is a bit disappointing, although it does feature a pretty substantial variety of toppings from the usual (fried shrimp) to the downright strange (fried salmon).

Muracci's also offers "Hot Curry Soup", with curry sauce poured over ramen or udon noodles. The menu is rounded out with items like oyakodon, katsudon, and a small handful of plain sushi rolls.

It's a tiny little place, with one (1) table for two and about seven counter seats. I'm guessing it does most of its business in take-out. If you go at about 5 PM for an early dinner, it'll be pretty empty.

Pity it's not open past 6 PM, or on the weekends at all. If you don't work in the Financial District, you'll likely have trouble finding time to go to Muracci's.

Original review 4.13.09: As only the second restaurant in San Francisco to focus entirely on serving Japanese curry, Volcano is on the front lines of promoting this most perfect of foods in America. Sadly, it's not pulling its weight: Volcano's curry is indeed better than most SF eateries' take on the dish, but it's still miles away from what you can get on any street corner in Tokyo.

The Geary corridor in San Francisco's Outer Richmond district is densely packed with ethnic restaurants of every persuasion, including many popular Japanese restaurants like Kitaro and Genki Ramen. Few of these serve curry, however. The sushi place on 22nd, now called Little Tokyo, used to feature a big hot plate of very good katsu curry, but hasn't had it on the menu in years.

Enter Volcano. Actually, it used to be called Hana Sushi Bang, and was just another one of the many, many sushi bars that dotted Geary. One quick makeover later, and they're serving up the hottest new Japanese food craze to hit America. But they're not doing it especially well. Volcano does get points for being the only curry joint in San Francisco to offer such classic toppings as cheese and sausage, and for being the only one open on weekends. Unfortunately, the curry itself is sub-par, and the presentation is…

…well, it's quite a mess, isn't it? Compare the image above to Muracci's elegant presentation and ovular bowl. Volcano's chefs just throw everything haphazardly onto a paper plate, and devil may care where the pieces fall. Curry, katsu, rice all mixed up, random pieces of carrot, boiled potato with skin, and grilled zucchini under the rice, under the katsu, under the cheese. Cheese on the katsu, not in the curry where it's supposed to go. Pickles dropped anywhere. A golf ball of a cocktail onion.

The curry sauce tastes better than the average restaurant curry, but is a bit runny and thin. Hilariously, I was given a plastic fork and knife with which to eat this soupy brown sauce. Yes, you can in fact pick up some curries with a fork. Volcano's is not one of them.

Japan is a country obsessed with wrapping and presentation. Volcano's curry would benefit from a little bit more attention paid to the composition of the plate -- ditching the plastic and paper for real silverware and table settings would be a start, followed by putting everything in its proper place instead of throwing it all into a ridiculous pile.

San Francisco's Ferry Building is hard to miss if you're downtown -- just look down Market Street towards the bay, and you'll see its clock tower pointing towards the sky. Inside is one of the city's favorite tourist spots, a collection of gourmet specialty food shops, wine bars and light eateries.

One of them is Delica rf-1, a "Japanese delicatessen." What is a Japanese delicatessen, anyway? Beats me, but what's on offer here is a somewhat pricey selection of light, fresh soups, salads, and bite-sized fried foods, all influenced by Japanese cuisine but decidedly Californian in their execution -- note the steak nigiri sushi made with hormone-free Meyer Ranch beef, or the vegan asparagus salad.

Anyway, we're here for the curry. As of this writing, Delica offered two different sauces, made with lamb and shrimp. If you're in love with the tastes of either of these two animals, you're in luck. If you prefer your curry pure, no dice. The taste of lamb or seafood permeates both sauces. When it was clear I was having trouble choosing, they offered me generous sample tastes of both.

I went with the lamb, and it was a gamy kind of curry that I hadn't tasted ever since the first and last time I tried Indian lamb curry, at an international food fair in the 8th grade. (To its credit, Delica's version did not take its horrific revenge on me later that evening.) It was actually pretty good -- so hot that copious amounts of steam rose out of the takeout bowl that all Delica's food is served in, and very flavorful.

It's just not Japanese curry as we understand it. Delica, of course, doesn't offer varying spiciness levels, or toppings. However, if you want to fake it, I recommend buying a few of their aforementioned bite-sized fried foods. Illustrated in the bowl of curry above, left to right, are their miniature tonkatsu with house-made sauce ($1.50), sweet and spicy chicken karaage ($1.50), and their creamy, delicious potato croquette made with Russet and Yukon Gold and sauteed onions ($1.75).

Of course, added to their already-expensive curry bowls ($8.50 for small, pictured, and $10 for large), eating katsu curry at Delica rf-1 could get expensive.