For over 20 years, Florida chef Eric Fralick dreamed of Kinjo, his Tampa restaurant that’s billed as “itameshi wafu Italian” cuisine. Opened last August, it serves dishes such as akami “spaghettoni” — lean bluefin tuna that’s cut to resemble pasta noodles and then served with a bagna cauda cream sauce — and a take on vitello tonnato enhanced with sake and black garlic.
Living in Japan in the early 2000s, Fralick fell in love with an Italian restaurant in the city of Shizuoka, where he ate Italian food, but with Japanese influences, like pastas made with uni and the fermented soybeans known as natto. “It really reminded me of home,” says Fralick, who grew up in upstate New York and started his cooking career in Italian fine dining. Even while running the sushi restaurants Noble Rice and Koya, Fralick wanted to return to Japanese Italian, and Fralick and his wife opened Kinjo in August of 2025.
The goal is “bringing those influences together in a creative way that doesn’t mar either cuisine,” Fralick says. His chawanmushi — Japanese steamed egg — features Parmesan broth and guanciale; his cappelletti is stuffed with ricotta, maitake mushrooms, pickled daikon radish, and balsamic vinegar.
Across the country, there’s a growing crop of Japanese Italian restaurants, with Kinjo in Tampa; Ama and Ciaorigato in San Francisco; Miso Mozza in Providence, Rhode Island; and Itameshi in Albany, New York, all of which have opened within the past year. They join earlier examples of the genre such as LA’s Orsa & Winston, which opened in 2013; Washington, D.C.’s Tonari and New York City’s Kimika, which both debuted in 2020; and Montclair, New Jersey’s Pastaramen, which opened in 2023.
There’s some variation in how these restaurants describe their concepts. Some call themselves “itameshi,” a Japanese term that literally means “Italian meal” but that has expanded to also refer to Japanese Italian fusion. Others opt for the term “wafu Italian,” with “wafu” an umbrella term that means “Japanese-style.” Others yet present themselves as various creative riffs on “Italian and Japanese.” All circle the same cultural collision, which has a long history in Japan and which has seen a surge of renewed interest in Tokyo in recent years.
Though European influences began to enter Japan in the late 19th century after the country opened its ports, it was the American occupation in the post-World War II period that gave rise to dishes like the ketchup spaghetti known as Napolitan, explains Sonoko Sakai, author of Wafu Cooking. The restaurant Kabe No Ana, credited for being the birthplace of wafu pasta, opened in Tokyo in 1953 and started serving spaghetti with ingredients like mentaiko and shimeji mushrooms. With Japanese inclusions such as natto, or shiitakes sauteed in soy sauce and sake, or sprinkles of nori, the pastas were “nothing that you would find in an Italian restaurant,” Sakai says. But today, tourists in Japan queue for hours for carbonara udon, considering it a must-have. By the time Orsa & Winston opened in LA in 2013, “diners in LA were globally literate,” chef and owner Josef Centeno said via email. “Travel, media, and access to information had expanded expectations. People were less concerned with strict categories and more interested in perspective.” The balance of cuisines at Orsa & Winston felt “natural,” he said.
In the past five or six years, this kind of fusion has become increasingly familiar to diners. Tonari opened in Washington, D.C. in early 2020 with the goal of educating the city about wafu Italian food, though its space dictated the concept to an extent: It was previously an Italian restaurant with a wood-burning oven that seemed a shame to remove. “What about wafu Italian?” recalls partner Daisuke Utagawa. At the time Tonari opened, pre-pandemic, “the mentality of the customer and the restaurant scene were totally different,” Utagawa says: People were more interested in discovering new-to-them cuisines.
While Japan is known for its traditionalist approach to Neapolitan pizza — in which pizza-makers study in Italy and use only imported Italian DOP cheese and tomatoes to create pies that rival the source material — Tonari wanted to go more wafu, drawing inspiration from the slabs of pizza toast found in the retro coffee shops known as kissaten. Enter Tonari’s Detroit-style pizza. It’s made with flour imported from Hokkaido, which gives it the right amount of chew for its thick crust, and features toppings such as the requisite brick cheese alongside corn and Kewpie mayo cod-roe cream, or Cheez Whiz with soy sauce- and mirin-braised prime rib. There are pastas, too, including a take on the mentaiko spaghetti that was popularized by Kabe No Ana; they’re made with pasta noodles that are also sourced from the restaurant’s Japanese ramen manufacturer. “Our customers are people who want to try different things,” Utagawa says. It’s comfort food by virtue of the format, “but it’s in a different way,” he says.
For chef Robbie Felice, learning about the history of wafu Italian food represented a major career turning point. He’d been cooking classic Italian food, even earning a James Beard nod for his Viaggio Ristorante in Wayne, New Jersey. But he wasn’t catching the eye of traditional media to the extent he wanted. “They didn’t give a shit about me or my Italian restaurants because I was in New Jersey,” he says. The pandemic offered an opportunity to step back and find a way to “stand out and be different.”
In 2021, Felice started hosting a series of exclusive, speakeasy-style Japanese Italian omakase dinners around the country, where he piloted dishes like cacio e pepe gyoza fritti. The series was a hit, and he eventually settled his wafu Italian concept down in Montclair, New Jersey, opening Pastaramen in 2023. Though Felice considers Montclair one of New Jersey’s more “foodie-centric” towns, it’s still a town dominated by Italian: There are literally 10 Italian restaurants within a close radius of his restaurant.
Felice acknowledges that while he could go more “out there” if he were cooking in NYC, his approach in Montclair reflects “what [he knows] the Jersey clientele likes.” Take his shrimp scampi ramen, a menu staple. It has sake and ponzu in addition to white wine and shrimp paste to intensify the seafood flavor; though the noodles are ramen, not pasta, it’s topped with garlic breadcrumbs and fresh parsley. “To take a favorite recipe that’s on every [Italian] menu across the country and make it Japanese Italian, I knew it was going to be a home run before we even did it,” he says.
While the presence of genre-blurring Japanese Italian restaurants is perhaps unsurprising in the country’s major dining hubs, the push into smaller cities and towns offers proof of just how far Japanese food has made it, becoming as familiar to Americans as Italian food; sushi is as much universally appealing “kid food” now as a plate of spaghetti. “I think it’s the two favorite cuisines of the world,” Felice says. “Everyone knows Italian and everyone knows Japanese.”
Similarly, Itameshi opened in Albany, New York, in August as a joint venture from the owners of local Italian restaurant Pastina and Japanese restaurant Tanpopo. The concept is “definitely new for Albany,” says bar director William Hoschek. Although udon Bolognese with whipped miso-ricotta might prompt initial confusion from diners, “when people sit down to eat, it’s pretty accessible,” he says. “All the dishes are really Italian in composition, which people in Albany are no stranger to.” Some hesitance remains around less familiar dishes. The squid ink spaghetti with uni-butter sauce, for example, isn’t ordered as much as “the more blatantly Italian dishes,” Hoschek says. This novelty can have its perks, though.
In Hoschek’s assessment, one reason consumers don’t go out as much is because they can cook well and make good cocktails at home; thus, dining out feels more special when the food isn’t as simple to replicate with store-bought ingredients. A recent survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers found that 68 percent of participants were planning to cut back on restaurant dining in 2026 due to rising costs. In this ecosystem, in which dining isn’t a constant but an occasional luxury, “having a unique concept and being more of a destination … definitely is in our favor,” Hoschek says.
Utagawa of Tonari offers a different assessment of the American dining scene today. “It’s not as exploratory,” he says. Though wafu Italian isn’t what diners expect of either Italian or Japanese food, both are individually familiar. The combination, then, can potentially hit a sweet spot of being both comforting and novel.
The tricky balance for restaurants today is presenting something new, but also being sure that people will like it. Two things are certain though: Diners love Italian, and they love Japanese. Put them together, and of course there’s an audience for that.
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