Tonari brings wafu Italian cooking to DC straight from Japan

WASHINGTON — Tonari, the most up-to-date cafe from the Daikaya Team, is on a mission. But its mission did not start off exactly where you might assume.

The people behind Daikaya individual quite a few ramen retailers spread out throughout the District, like its namesake ramen shop (with Izakaya upstairs) Bantam King fried chicken and ramen, Hatoba and Haikan.

Tonari is appropriate following door to Daikaya, and about the corner from Bantam King. But for the group’s following act, they did not want to open up yet another ramen store.

To listen to Daikaya co-owner Daisuke Utagawa make clear it, when they walked into the area that would become Tonari, they understood what they experienced to do.

The thought for Tonari is wafu Italian cuisine.

“The term wafu signifies Japanese-type,” Daisuke described. “Normally it indicates a thing that is not initially Japanese that is done in Japanese type.”

Daisuke says Tonari’s wafu Italian is not a new model of cuisine, but it is one thing that is new to D.C., and new to the United States.

“Wafu Italian is not something we invented,” Daisuke reported. “It is something that exists in Japan, but it is not nicely-acknowledged exterior of Japan.”

Daisuke stresses that wafu Italian is a coming-alongside one another of cultures, somewhat than what some might phone “fusion.”

“I individually do not like the word fusion,” he claimed. “Not due to the fact of what it usually means, but mainly because of what the connotations are. There’s a distinction concerning a purely natural cultural phenomenon of two matters meeting and turning out to be anything, almost organically, versus a little something which is set jointly by power.”

That is the mission driving Tonari: To educate persons about the notion of wafu Italian delicacies. To display the background of two cuisines that arrived alongside one another by natural means in excess of the program of many years in Japan.

Wafu pasta dates again to the ‘50s with a cafe whose identify interprets to “hole in the wall.” Daisuke claimed the purpose that the use of Japanese elements in Italian cooking took off in Japan is that the two cultures share a very similar tactic to cuisine.

So why convey that design of cooking to D.C. diners?

“Here’s a simple remedy for you,” Daisuke says, gesturing to a enormous black pizza about at the centre of the kitchen area. “That oven.”

It was crystal clear to the Tonari staff that they wished to use that massive oven in some regard. That’s in which the principle of wafu pizza and pasta was born. But while wafu pasta experienced roots and record behind it, wafu pizza was one thing totally new, and a thing that Daisuke and his lover dove into headfirst. 

Getting currently proven a ramen supplier in Sapporo, Japan by means of their other ventures, that provider told them they also make pasta, and that they tasted unique from any other pasta they could get due to the fact of how they are manufactured.

“They have this ramen technological innovation and they utilized it to pasta, and it’s a thoroughly different issue,” Daisuke explained.

Pizza was additional operate. Considering that there was no established wafu pizza, they had to start from the floor up.

“If we want to make wafu pizza, we have to define it,” Daisuke claimed. 

That sent Daisuke and his Daikaya husband or wife Chef Katsuya Fukushima to Japan to produce a dough using inspiration from Japanese milk bread – what Daisuke phone calls Japanified Wonderbread.

“We went by iteration and iteration and iteration and what we arrived up with was like, ‘Oh my god, this is seriously great,” Daisuke mentioned. 

He stated the complete approach took about 3 months, through a lot of back-and-forth and demo-and-error. They worked on anything from the factors of the dough to the cooking vessel, to the temperature and timing right before they settled on the dough.

What ends up on your plate at Tonari is a thing that appears to be like your normal deep dish pizza, but tastes absolutely various. It is crispy and crunchy, though getting chewy and pillowy at the exact time. It’s immensely craveable.

What pushed Daisuke and his husband or wife to develop this new pizza? The brief respond to is the oven, but it goes further than that.

“There’s a lot of methods to glance at a cafe. A single is, you are hungry, you happen to be feeding people today. But you can do that any where,” Daisuke mentioned. “But when you are going to a restaurant, you obtained to have an additional reason to go there. At the close of the day it is a community, correct? When you are generating a group you have to have ethos. The ethos to us is really significant. We’re in this each individual working day. If we just do it mainly because ‘Yeah, it’s a organization,’ you type of shed enthusiasm.”

That enthusiasm was analyzed when Tonari to start with opened its doors in 2020. Months afterwards the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the restaurant had to pivot, briefly featuring just take-away options, shutting down and ultimately featuring a tasting menu the moment doors opened once again.

Now, Tonari is again to complete strength, they have nixed the tasting menu and offer you products a la carte. They were also just extra to the 2022 version of the D.C. Michelin Guideline. From exactly where Daisuke is standing, the accolades are not what this cafe is about. The purpose is not to get a Michelin star.

Similar: Extra than a dozen DC dining places included to Michelin Tutorial

Linked: What is in a star? This is what it normally takes to get 1 of cooking’s largest honors

“Our target is not to be a Michelin-star restaurant,” he reported. “Our objective is to get the word out on what individuals are ingesting in Japan now.”

That push to get the phrase out is a thing shared by Nico Cezar, Chef de Delicacies at Tonari. Chef Nico is an alum of Michelin star Italian cafe Masseria so he’s placing his qualifications to superior use.

“It’s a blessing for me to be capable to parallel my teaching below cooking Japanese meals and cooking Italian food items, which can make [wafu cooking] a minimal less complicated to approach because I know that I can use this ingredient, or that procedure,”Cezar claimed. “It’s less difficult for me to approach it that way than sticking to traditional Italian or basic Japanese. What we want to do is make guaranteed that we are obeying this culture of foodstuff in Japan and introducing it to the world… Making them mindful that there is such a issue as Japanese-style Italian food. We’re not making an attempt to mash up matters for the sake of fusing two cultures alongside one another, you want to make sure that it is paying out homage to that culture-specific food design and style.”

Even though cooking the spaghetti napolitan, a dish that’s been on the menu considering that Tonari opened, the chef explains the worth of the noodles and the fresh new ingredients utilized to deliver the straightforward dish together.

“I consider it surprises individuals anytime they style the dish, they are like, ‘Oh it is a ketchup spaghetti, how superior could it be?’ It is just how it is set with each other,” Cezar reported. “Purchasing products which is at the height of its period. The best of what you can responsibly get. A little something which is sustainable. That is a little something that I want to thrust forward to the menus that we have in this article, just earning confident that we’re sticking to the similar idea of symbolizing Italian cooking and Japanese cooking… earning certain that we’re paying out respects in a respectable way with out striving to reinvent the wheel. At the close of the working day I want Japanese persons to occur in in this article and be like ‘Oh, this still tends to make feeling. This cafe is undertaking each planning or technique justice and representing it well.’”

The menu, which Cezar would like to transform just about every month, features some pizza and pasta combinations that may well be challenging to some diners, but Cezar hopes that people who appear to Tonari will be adventurous, and prepared to attempt anything new. For occasion, the Mentaiko cream is a sauce made with cod roe. Proper now, it really is showcased on the two a pasta and a pizza on the menu.

As he loads a Mentaiko and corn pizza into the all-important pizza oven, he clarifies that the pie gets loaded with cheese, and that the cheese will help the pizza get ridiculously crispy in the pan.

“It’s practically like a corner of a lasagna, but everyone receives a corner piece,” he reported.

Cezar claims acquiring new menu things and recipes can be complicated, but it’s some thing he enjoys.

“The elegance about discovering Japanese-type cooking is you worth subtraction as you go,” the chef claimed. “You only use what you will need, and that is extremely difficult for a chef to do.”

He said it goes back again to the mission of having the word out about wafu delicacies.

“How do you educate people today is the difficult section,” Cezar stated. “If you blindfold any individual they’ll think, ‘this is a pepperoni pizza.’ Yeah, but do you taste the intricacies of the components that go into the sauce? Which is the challenge. I think we have finished a fantastic career. My hope is that, going forward, we’ll have a whole lot extra people curious to arrive and say, ‘I want to see what you guys are undertaking.'” 

707 6th Road Northwest
Monday & Tuesday – closed
Wednesday & Thursday – 5 pm to 9:30 pm
Friday and Saturday – 5 pm – 10 pm
Sunday – 5 pm – 9 pm

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