Handmade local Italian ethos in Ibaraki

Destination Restaurants often highlights places that, despite being close to Tokyo, are easy to overlook. Nonna Nietta, an Italian restaurant in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture — about an hour and a half from Tokyo Station by train or highway bus — is one example.

Tsukuba is known as a planned science city developed from the 1960s onward in a region once dominated by farmland. Near Mount Tsukuba, one of Japan’s 100 famous mountains, the city hosts numerous universities and public research institutes. The prefecture also plays a crucial role as a major producer of vegetables, meat and seafood for the capital region. Yet in terms of gastronomy, the area long lacked a strong identity. That, however, is beginning to change.

In recent years, chefs across a wide range of cuisines — Japanese, French, Chinese and more — have begun to collaborate by exchanging information about ingredients and techniques and holding study sessions, rapidly raising the region’s gastronomic ambitions. Kenji Kawamura, the owner-chef of Nonna Nietta, is at the center of this movement.

Kawamura was born in 1978 in Tsuchiura, a city adjacent to Tsukuba. After working in Italian restaurants in Tokyo, he moved to Italy at age 28. Over six years, he honed his craft in restaurants in Naples, Bologna and the regions of Calabria, Puglia and Piedmont. He opened Nonna Nietta in 2021. The name, which means “Grandma Nietta,” comes from the grandmother of his Italian wife, whom he met during his time abroad.

The house in a quiet residential area feels like a country home in Italy. In the front garden grow thyme, rosemary and other herbs, and the six-seat dining room is filled with furniture brought from his wife’s family home, along with Italian window frames, linens and other details.

But the most genuinely Italian aspect may be the chef’s philosophy of using local ingredients and making as much as possible by hand. The tasting menu, priced at ¥16,500 ($110), consists of 11 courses, from appetizers to dessert. It features a generous array of Ibaraki produce, including eggplants and zucchini grown on Kawamura’s family farm, local vegetables, meats such as Hitachi beef, Hitachi no Kagayaki pork and wild duck, and seafood from the Ibaraki coast and Lake Kasumigaura. All cheeses and cured meats are homemade. Kawamura also uses the abundant whey produced during cheese-making as a kind of broth, creating a distinctive depth of flavor — a technique that showcases his inventiveness.

With restaurants like this emerging across the prefecture, Ibaraki is drawing attention as a new destination for gastronomic travel.

■Sustainable Japan Magazine (Sustainable Japan by The Japan Times)
https://sustainable.japantimes.com/magazine/vol54/54-01