Tonteki is sauteed pork loin with a garlicky savory brown sauce. This hearty but reasonable B-class gourmet dish started in Yokkaichi city in Mie prefecture originally, but gradually spread to other parts of Japan.
Tonteki means pork (ton) steak (teki), and its origin is interestingly at a Chinese restaurant in Yokkaichi city in the 1960s. The dish was first created by the restaurant owner to satisfy the appetite of manual labor workers in the industrial city, but it gained its popularity quickly with many other people. Now a lot of restaurants in the area and beyond serve this pork dish with variations of their brown sauce.