The Best Japanese Food in Italy

Floor-to-ceiling windows flood a spare, minimal dining room at the base of a Porta Nuova tower, where a Michelin-starred kaiseki restaurant works through the full arc of Japanese cuisine, raw to cooked. The chef's menu moves from sashimi and nigiri into traditional preparations, including Iberian pork with negimiso sauce served on a magnolia leaf. A separate omakase counter runs its own show by reservation, worth booking before you arrive.

Twelve apostle statuettes watch over a four-table dining room inside a hotel that has been around forever, which lends the whole experience a pleasantly surreal weight. This is a fine-dining tasting menu restaurant, and chef Mathias Bachmann's cooking pulls from global technique with a particular lean toward Japan, then lands it somewhere unmistakably alpine. The service team will also tell you, with evident delight, about the elephant. It holds a Michelin star.

The robatayaki grill is going at this sleek, Michelin-starred Japanese contemporary restaurant in a quiet corner of Milan, which has quietly become the city's benchmark for serious Japanese cooking. The menu moves from sushi and sashimi through light tempura to the open fire, with a fusion of Japanese and European ideas that feels considered rather than compromised. Lunch runs à la carte; dinner leans into tasting menus.

A sushi restaurant in Porta Romana where the case for Japanese traditionalism is made quietly, through precise knife work and clean preparations that don't need architectural plating to make their point. An omakase counter lets you watch the chef work up close. The sake selection is taken seriously alongside the wine list, and tempura with wasabi salt has a way of settling any doubts about the kitchen's priorities.

Twelve seats at the counter, no menu, and the chef decides everything, which is the whole point of omakase. This is an intimate sushi counter in central Prato run by an Italian chef whose years of travel through Japan show up in the fish he selects each morning at market. The course changes daily, the wine list is solid, and the room fills fast enough that booking borders on mandatory.

A medieval courtyard in central Bologna is a genuinely odd setting for a sushi restaurant, but the contrast works. The dining room runs modern bistro, and in summer the courtyard fills up nicely. The menu stays close to Japanese tradition with a few personal riffs, and the front-of-house team is unusually good at walking newcomers through both the food and the sake list without making anyone feel remedial.

The sushi counter runs omakase only, eight to eleven courses, no à la carte wandering allowed. This is a contemporary Japanese restaurant where the chef moves between raw fish and Angus beef with equal confidence, folding miso, truffle, and yuzu into the through-line. The room reads like a serious night out in Milan, dressed up but not stiff. A Michelin Guide selection, and ranked among Italy's top sushi spots by 50 Top Italy.

The lacquered bento box is both the premise and the personality here. Yoji Tokuyoshi, once Massimo Bottura's sous-chef at Osteria Francescana, pivoted from fine dining to a format rooted in his mother's packed lunches, and the result is a casual restaurant where Japanese and Mediterranean impulses share the compartments. The cooking is precise without being stiff, and the room feels like a chef genuinely having a better time than before.

A short walk from Lucca's medieval walls, this cosy Japanese fusion restaurant earns a Michelin Bib Gourmand by threading together tradition and personal memory. Counter seats face the kitchen directly, which suits the format: gyoza, nigiri, and ramen pulled from Southern Japanese cooking, filtered through one chef's upbringing. The lunch teishoku sets a main beside a curated spread of small plates, and the room, all comfortable sofas, feels warmer than the premise suggests.

A Japanese and fusion restaurant tucked into central Teramo, Oishi holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand and runs a menu of sashimi, nigiri, rolls, and tempura that occasionally detours through local Abruzzese ingredients. The room was recently redone in a minimalist, quietly colorful style that earns the name, which means "delicious" in Japanese. Italian craft beers, chosen with an eastward lean, round out a wine list that keeps pace.

A sushi restaurant in Perugia that also runs a traditional Japanese menu, and does both with the kind of unhurried seriousness you don't expect this far from the coast. The room is relaxed and welcoming, and the presentation is careful without being fussy. Prices sit above what the region usually asks, but the sourcing explains most of it. It landed at number eight on 50 Top Italy's sushi list, which for Umbria is a fairly extraordinary thing to be able to say.

Orders go through a window cut into the wall, which tells you everything about the format before you've even looked at the menu. Katsusanderia is a Japanese street food counter in Milan serving sando on housemade bread, rice bowls, and sides like potato salad and eggplant in sesame sauce. The drinks run to Japanese beer and sake, nothing fussier. It's a long way from the all-you-can-eat circuit, and the sandwiches are substantial enough that you won't need a second lunch.

A sushi and fusion restaurant in the old heart of Turin where the menu runs on the motto "Taste different," which it seems to mean. The kitchen bends Japanese technique toward Sicilian instincts and the occasional French flourish, cold green-tea noodles sharing the menu with wagyu ham and butter-seared scallop. It ranked sixth on 50 Top Italy's sushi list, for whatever direction you need pointing.

A proper sushi bar counter greets you at the door in the San Lorenzo neighborhood, the kind where the staff will walk you through the menu without making you feel like a tourist in your own dinner. The room keeps things spare, a nod to Japanese minimalism without the full performance of it. Fresh fish, simply handled, drives everything here, with salmon worth noting in particular. A small, considered wine list rounds things out.

The name means "journey," and the kitchen leans into that, blending sushi with pan-Asian touches and cooked Japanese dishes in a restaurant that's been a Naples reference point since its earlier days on Cappella Vecchia. The menu is ambitious enough to reward the curious, though the crowd's pull toward familiar sushi selections is real. Let the team guide you through the tasting progression instead, and the place becomes something else entirely. Ranked third on 50 Top Italy's sushi list.

A small sushi spot a short walk from Benevento's center that has quietly become a reference point for sushi lovers across Campania. Seating is tight, the menu is long, and the chef has the kind of personality that fills both gaps. He'll steer you through a tasting sequence with evident enthusiasm. The wine list throws in some champagne and natural bottles alongside Japanese beer and sake, which is not what you expect in this corner of southern Italy.

The ground-floor restaurant inside the W Florence runs on pulsing music and a metropolitan buzz that feels more Tokyo-by-way-of-LA than Tuscany. Akira Back is the chef's Italian debut, and the kitchen plays with Korean, Japanese, and American flavors in a way that's loose and a little theatrical. Cocktails are the natural pairing here, and the bar leans into that obligation happily.

A recently refurbished Japanese restaurant on Corso Lodi that now reads more like a sleek bistro than a sushi counter, which turns out to suit it. The menu runs through the classics, sashimi and uramaki and the like, alongside the kitchen's own creations and some Mediterranean-leaning detours. The wine list comes with a few sakes, overseen by a sommelier who has clearly done the homework.

A kaiseki restaurant tucked just off Via Veneto, where the fish arrives so fresh the raw preparations almost make the case on their own. Kohaku brings Japanese haute cuisine to Rome with precise knife work and composed presentations, running from gyoza and tempura through to charcoal-grilled meats. An eight-course kaiseki menu is available at dinner for anyone who wants to hand the evening over entirely.

A Japanese restaurant just outside San Pantaleo's village center, built on a premise that could easily go wrong: an Italian chef who learned his craft traveling the world, now pulling fresh Sardinian fish into sushi and gyoza in a quietly minimal room. The Italian-Japanese handshake extends to dessert, where mochi shares the table with Italian-inspired sweets. The Michelin Guide has it selected, and the logic tracks.

Minimalist interiors and a full-on Japanese aesthetic mark this long-running Milan restaurant, where the menu runs deeper than most. It's a traditional Japanese dining room doing set lunch and à la carte at dinner, with the kind of range that rewards slow reading. The sukiyaki, a simmering tableside broth of meat and vegetables meant for sharing, is the sort of thing that turns a weeknight into an occasion.

The yakitori grill sits right at the entrance so the smoke hits you before the host does. This is a Japanese contemporary restaurant where a Kyoto-born chef turns out kushiyaki skewers over open flame alongside wagyu cooked tableside over charcoal by the guest. One wall holds over 150 sake labels, refreshed weekly, and the sommelier has an opinion about all of them. The room is spare and calm, the kind of place that takes the food seriously without asking you to.

A small Japanese restaurant on a narrow street in the historic centre, with just enough covers inside and on the terrace to make a reservation feel less optional than the menu suggests. The kitchen runs a classical lineup, hand-rolled gyoza, tempura, raw fish, ramen, and rice dishes executed without fanfare. The Japanese clientele filling most of the seats is its own quiet argument. Sake, shochu, and craft beer, plus wine for the unconvinced.

Fourteen seats arranged in a horseshoe around two chefs is the whole architecture of this intimate omakase counter, where every piece of fish is shaped in front of you and the conversation with the chefs is considered part of the meal. Eating with your hands is encouraged, sake by the glass pairs naturally with the progression, and the lunch menu runs shorter if the full ritual feels like a commitment.

The conveyor belt runs on one side; a hushed omakase room sits on the other. This Japanese restaurant in Rome splits its personality cleanly between Sushisen Kaitenzushi's counter energy and the more formal Experience side, where the chef's tasting sequence takes its time. Both menus share a kitchen, and the all-female service team holds everything together with quiet precision. Sake and wine pour by the glass throughout.

Raw tuna noodles in dashi broth with a splash of yuzu and sake-marinated salmon roe give you the measure of this contemporary Japanese restaurant tucked behind Corso Como. The counter with stools along the back wall sets the tone: precise, slightly minimal, quietly international. Sushi, sashimi, uramaki, robata, and gyoza share the menu, and the wine list covers both Italian labels and champagne alongside sake by the glass.

White onyx panels and soft lighting set a mood of deliberate calm at this Japanese fine dining restaurant on Corso Magenta. The kitchen runs on rigorous technique and high-grade ingredients, with an omakase menu that hands control entirely to the chefs. Sitting at the counter while they work is its own argument for the format. The crowd tends toward people who booked weeks ago and mean it.

The name on the awning is Japanese, but the spirit is closer to a grandmother's kitchen than a sushi counter. This cozy restaurant near the Duomo was opened to serve the vegetables, curries, and donburi that Milan's many Japanese spots tend to skip entirely. The ka-ree and the potato salad with Japanese mayonnaise are the kind of things you don't realize you've been missing until they're in front of you.