Romantico

Squid ink at the counter

Squid ink darkens the risotto before Kentaro Nakayama, chef at Romantico in Ome, pulls the plate back into restraint. His cooking here carries a practical education: apprenticeship in the 1980s, Italy in 1992 as a first-generation ICIF student, then the longer work of bringing Italian and French technique into a Japanese room without letting either become costume. The station is not built for display. It asks for proportion, timing, and the judgment to stop before a dish becomes decorative.

Nakayama’s public role is Executive Chef, but the more useful word is responsible. At Romantico, that responsibility sits close to the hands: the pass, the counter, the sequence of plates, the quiet calibration of Italian forms for Japanese diners. A 2006 description of him as an honest chef matters because it names the discipline rather than the mood. He cooks from study abroad, from French cuisine within his specialty, and from a Japanese sense of reception. The plate has to hold all of that without announcing it.

Italian technique held in a Japanese frame

The kitchen’s signatures give the method its shape. Anago fritter brings a Japanese ingredient into an Italian gesture, where the question is not novelty but texture: the lift of batter, the heat held in the fish, the point at which refinement still leaves comfort intact. Squid ink risotto asks for depth without heaviness. Confit ayu fish moves in another register, quieter and more local in its associations, with oil, time, and temperature doing the work that garnish cannot.

Romantico’s cooking is Italian, yet Nakayama’s is not a copy of Italy. His ICIF period in 1992 gives the cuisine a direct line to Italian training, while French technique remains part of his range. The interest is in translation by practice: how a risotto sits after Japanese fish, how bitterness, salt, and fat land in a compact meal, how much explanation a dish needs when the cooking has already made its case. The restaurant’s identity rests on that restraint.

A small room around the pass

The room is bar-counter in feeling, with the work close enough that the pass becomes part of the meal’s architecture. Romantico sits above the street in Shirokanedai, and the scale keeps attention on the bench rather than the room’s performance. Plates move out from the kitchen without ceremony. The chef does not build the night around talk. He lets the sequence do most of the speaking.

That closeness changes how the craft is read. A fritter arrives with its heat still intact; risotto carries the sheen and density of the last turn in the pan; ayu keeps the softness that confit is meant to protect. The counter makes small decisions visible, not theatrical. At Romantico, the lasting measure is the exactness of Nakayama’s anago fritter.