Pizza Piazza - a casual Italian restaurant in the neighborhood

Pizza Piazza is a popular casual Italian restaurant in the southern neighborhood of Hamadayama Station. Its casual ambience, delicious food and friendly and flexible service attract various types of guests such as families with small children, young couples, business partners and single guests.

Italian people might say that it is more appropriate to call such a place "pizzeria" than "restaurant". However, the border between two categories is not much clear in Japan, as most Japanese guests are fond of pasta and an extensive menu of pasta and pizza dishes is a prerequisite for an Italian restaurant to succeed in Japan. Even high class Italian restaurants allow their guests to skip main course and go directly to dolce after pasta. Frankly speaking, I believe that the popularity of the Italian cuisine in Japan is based on its pasta and pizza, and to a lesser extent on its dolce and starter, but not on its main dishes, because Japanese people, in particular women, are in general fond of flour dishes and they shy away from heavy and greasy meat dishes.

Half of the Pizza Quattroformaggi

I often go Pasta Piazza either with family or with orchestra friends.

Though Pizza Piazza is small it is relatively spacious compared with other restaurants in its neighborhood and its staffs are friendly also to orchestra members. Musicians are usually not welcome in many restaurants or izakayas, because they carry large instruments such as cello and occupy much more space than usual guests. However, the owner of Pizza Piazza even tells us that he can reserve space for after rehearsal gatherings if we only give him a call beforehand. One service staff, a young girl, once confessed us that she plays double base. Thereafter, we have been trying to recruit her to our orchestra, but not successful, though she is always kind to us whenever we are there.

Among the pizza menus, our family favors pizza quattro formaggi; four kinds of cheese are here Gorgonzola, Taleggio, Mozzarella and Parmigiano-Reggiano. The shape of pizza at Pizza Piazza is not round but rectangle. Therefore, I upload here only a half of the pizza to save space.

Salad Capriccio

Caponata

As we are "grass eating animals", we ordered today Caponata and Salad Capricciosa. I do not know exactly what the difference between Caponata and Ratatouille is, but Caponata is a good side dish for red wine. As for drinks, I started with a mug of draft beer and switched to red wine. After entrée and pasta, I skipped dolce this time and finished the meal with double Espresso coffee. I paid about US $60 for two persons.

While we were there a party of little kids was going on. About 10 kids, maybe kindergarten children, were accompanied by mothers. Though it was heavily raining outside, Pizza Piazza was crowded with many young and old guests.

2011.5.30