The Japanese fascination with Italian food goes back decades, but it wasn’t until the 90s that itameshi, as it was known, came into its own and informal, inexpensive Italian food prepared with quintessentially Japanese ingredients supplanted high-end French as the exotic foreign obsession della giornata. It’s difficult to imagine two world cuisines more suited to one another, if only for their mutual fidelity to pasta.
Running concurrently with Stephen Gillanders’s dim sum menu, Osaka’s selection of dishes is rather focused: mainly pastas and secondi, a few contorni and insalata, and a handful of appetizers and antipasti. The latter are appealing enough, consisting of well-known bites like crispy arancini composed of sushi rice studded with bits of Japanese pickle, tangy aioli spiked with fermented beans on the side. In fact, the Japanese elements of a good number of these little dishes are distinguished predominately by some type of dipping sauce. That’s true of likably greasy tempura-fried calamari, tossed with fried brussels-sprout leaves and served with a ketchupy tomato-ponzu sauce. Even more subdued is a trio of soft chicken meatballs, perhaps more typical of the robata grill but here soaking in a straightforward red sauce, with more brassica snuck in rather than the promised Japanese eggplant.
Thankfully the rest of the pastas are more impressive. Rigatoni with pork belly pays direct homage to tonkotsu ramen; the slurpable oleaginous broth has a gelatinous sheen and teems with melting belly and springy rigatoni decorated with slivers of scallion. Thick jet-black squid-ink linguine in an arrabbiata sauce that’s more like mild irritation than full-on spicy-meatball fury features a half Maine lobster splayed on top, meaty tail and inedible forebody both, presenting an arresting bowl. Stiff agnolotti stuffed with kabocha avoids the cloying trap squash-filled pastas tend to fall into, instead contributing to an adult savoriness with matsutake mushrooms and a mushroom dashi broth.
Beyond pasta, the cliches of Italian and Japanese food seem both complementary and contradictory enough to create a balanced and seamless itameshi: the Japanese dedication to craft, so subtle and nuanced as to be completely imperceptible, fused with rustic peasant charm and the nonchalance of Mediterranean sprezzatura, both transforming pristine raw ingredients according to culinary traditions thousands of years old. That’s a fusion we could all get behind, but despite some very good dishes on Osaka’s menu, his interpretation seems to mute the charms of both cuisines. You have until January 21 to judge for yourself. v
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