Pizzeria e Trattoria da ISA, Nakameguro, Tokyo
Every day at exactly 5pm, the speakers of the public address system near my apartment in Tokyo play a lilting nursery rhyme-like tune. Depending on who you ask, this is either to reassure you that the world hasn’t fallen in and everything is in its place and just as it should be, or (if you are a child) it represents the death of your late afternoon freedom and you should get your bloody skates on home before your curfew.
Either way, it is incredibly Japanese. This is a country with almost no litter on the streets, crime rates so low an ant couldn’t limbo under them and where speaking on your phone (or, in fact creating any kind of noise) in public spaces is generally considered an unspeakable crime. In short, it is incredibly pleasant. And so is everyone in it. Tokyo is roughly the size of a small country but once you are outside of the tourist scramble, it can often feel like an urban oasis. Calm. Just so.
I can only imagine what the poor well meaning Japanese must think when they visit our cities, infested with litter, noise, homelessness and crime. It’s probably why many don’t bother that much. And, frankly, who would blame them.
The flip side is that, aside from the odd abrasive drunken salaryman late at night, there is very little of the usual friction, chaos and general untidiness which makes most world cities that curious combination of compelling and utterly revolting. The loud clanking of teacups and crockery in a Hong Kong dim sum restaurant on a Saturday morning, which feels like authentic humanity to me, would probably be a borderline criminal offence if exported in full to suburban Tokyo.
But, despite the occasional odd feeling of over-sanitization, Tokyo is an epicenter of culture in all its forms. Design museums, cat cafes, graffiti, manga, haute cuisine, J-Pop, weird Japanese comic-based porn. It’s all here.
And this is the inherent contradiction, and perhaps appeal, of the Land of the Rising Sun. It is at once comfortable, clean, safe and very orderly but yet feels freeing, counter(?)cultural, baffling and occasionally devious and edgy. It is a balance nowhere else can strike, or at least, not as well.
Which brings me to Pizzeria e Trattoria da ISA. It is odd for my first post on the Tokyo food scene to be about pizza, but it feels appropriate somehow. For this is not just any old pizza joint. It one of the places for pizza in a city that is mad about food and even madder about making that food just so.
The chef has apparently won the World Pizza Cup competition held in the home of pizza, Naples, for three consecutive years. Just mull on that for a moment. This random Japanese man with a habit for perfectionism went to Italy and beat the Italians at their own game. Three times.
And, from the state of the Margherita (¥1600 = GBP£10) he served me for my weekday lunch, I would say that is underselling how good he is. Pizza comes in all shapes and sizes elsewhere, but if you want the legit, straight up Neapolitan classic, this. Is . It. Slightly chewy dough, a dry but not too crisp bottom, and a perfect balance of tomato, cheese and basil on top.
In perhaps another nod to perfectionism, the pizza was even served at eating temperature, which is something I noticed – and very much appreciated - about half way through eating said pizza, this typically being the point at which I peel a thin layer of skin from the roof of my mouth having dived in too eagerly a few moments prior to an oven-hot offering.
If you shut your eyes while chewing, you would have transported yourself quite quickly to the southern Italian city made famous for mobsters and pizza. But you didn’t have to shut your eyes. This is because the man not only makes classic Neapolitan pizza better than the Italians, he has decorated his shop, with painstaking precision, in the style of a slightly run down Italian trattoria. There are weathered tiles on the surfaces, a massive wood burning oven and slightly decrepit fridges at the back and pictures on the walls of Diego Maradona in his pomp proudly wearing a Napoli shirt. Not only has he done it to the pizza, but he has even made the place just so.
For moment I had to catch myself. I mean, it’s insane, right? This random Japanese dude has worked out how to make pizza better than the Italians, then spent all his time recreating the exact look and feel of an Italian pizzeria in a very well to do neighbourhood in central Tokyo.
It goes without saying that I liked it. In fact, I bloody loved it and will be returning to stuff my face with pizza every time I pass. But one thing did linger with me. And it goes back to what I mentioned earlier.
On the one hand, this is clearly curated, right down to the decrepit fridges. It’s a shrine to Italian pizza, at once completely out of context, but inarguably awesome. In any other city I might have laughed at it as gimmicky. Naff. Try hard, maybe. But here, in this city of clean streets and culture clashes and where everything is just so, it feels strangely right. Authentic even. This wonderful man has created a perfect love letter to pizza and to Italy in a land far far away. It is a splendid riddle in a city of wonderful contradictions. Could it exist in Naples? Well, it sorta does. But it feels just so right here.
