Every year, the 50 Top Pizza World list recognizes the best Neapolitan-style pizza inside and outside Italy. Though a pizzeria in Naples naturally tops the 2023 list, there are also a couple of Tokyo restaurants on there — one of which, The Pizza Bar on 38th, climbed the rankings from #16 to #4 this year.
Located on the top floor of the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Nihonbashi, The Pizza Bar on 38th is also listed as a Bib Gourmand selection in the Michelin Guide (though prices are more in the one-or-two-star range). Normally, the restaurant, run by Rome-born Chef Daniele Cason, can only accommodate eight guests around its marble-top counter. However, when we ate there for Sunday brunch last month, it had expanded beyond this setup. The counter was closed off and they had everyone seated in the adjacent dining room of the hotel’s other Italian restaurant, K’shiki.
This may have been because The Pizza Bar on 38th was temporarily serving a special combined menu with Tokuyoshi, the namesake of Chef Yoji Tokuyoshi, who runs Alter Ego, another one-star Michelin restaurant in Central Tokyo. For three days in October, this limited-time omakase (chef-curated) tasting menu allowed guests to dine on the cuisine of two Michelin chefs for the price of one.
Tokuyoshi and The Pizza Bar on 38th
According to the Mandarin Oriental Tokyo’s official Instagram account, the collaboration between Tokuyoshi and The Pizza Bar on 38th only lasted from October 20 to 22. We were there on the final day, and in lieu of the usual eight kinds of pizza, we enjoyed a full eight-course meal of pizza and other Italian dishes with a Japanese twist. That’s Chef Tokuyoshi’s specialty. In addition to Alter Ego, he was the name behind Ristorante Tokuyoshi, where he became the first Japanese chef to earn a Michelin star in Milan, Italy, back in 2015.
With the mashup menu, the one downside was that we only got to sample two varieties of Chef Cason’s pizza. The first slice was a simple marinara topped with anchovies and Aomori garlic. The second slice had a base of cauliflower puree rather than marinara, which gave it a richer and creamier taste. It was topped with scallops, smoked mozzarella, and almond Castelmagno cheese.
Another highlight of our meal was the spaghetti with tuna bottarga, a Sicilian delicacy. Black olives are normally my least favorite food, but I also enjoyed Chef Cason’s pizzino, a crumbly focaccia dish where the olives were subsumed by the more dominant flavor of autumn black truffles.
Dessert was a dish called cemento e terra (cement and earth). It consisted of “Jerusalem artichoke gelato, mascarpone cream cacao salty crumble and meringue,” according to the menu, which came personalized with Mr. Joshua Meyer’s name on it. For me, polishing off the “cement” part of this dessert was almost like eating gourmet astronaut ice cream.
The Mandarin Oriental View and Return to Nihonbashi
It turns out hotels like the Park Hyatt Tokyo (or even the public restroom on the 14th floor of Takashimaya Times Square in Shinjuku) aren’t the only such places with a commanding view of Tokyo landmarks. At one point during our meal, I took a trip to the men’s room on the 38th floor of the Mandarin Oriental, and I was immediately wowed by the view from its floor-to-ceiling windows of the Skytree and Tokyo’s vast urban sprawl. The K’shiki dining room also had a nice view of Nihonbashi, which I’ve written about previously, but which Azusa had never visited before.
At the end of the meal, both chefs came around to our table, and as we were leaving, I overheard a hostess turning other would-be patrons away. Evidently, at The Pizza Bar on 38th, the dough is made to order for each reservation, and it has to ferment 48 hours beforehand. Hearing this added to the feeling of exclusivity, though I have to say … most rooms in the Mandarin Oriental seem to be north of ¥100,000 a night, so we’d probably be much more likely to just dine at this hotel again than we would be to ever stay there.
In the future, I’d like to try both Alter Ego and The Pizza Bar on 38th separately so we can have the experience of dining on each chef’s full menu. In the meantime, before we left Nihonbashi, I took Azusa around to some of the other nearby landmarks, like Nihonbashi Bridge, the Zero Kilometer marker, and Japan’s oldest department store, Mitsukoshi.
Inside the store, I showed her the atrium after we strolled the rooftop garden and admired its bonsai plants. Since this was just before Halloween, the lion statues outside were decorated with witch hats. Our version of Halloween was to split a second dessert of bulbous white kumo cake from The Mandarin Oriental Gourmet Shop. Only 25 to 35 of these “cloud” cakes are sold per day.
