Pizza Omakase at The Pizza Bar on 38th (Tokyo)

I spent my first couple of trips to Japan eating strictly Japanese food, but then I was finally ready to focus on Japanese pizza. On top of my list was, of course, the omakase at The Pizza Bar on 38th. Located on the 38th floor of the Mandarin Oriental, Tokyo, The Pizza Bar is a counter with only 8 seats serving a pizza omakase. With only 8 seats, advance reservations are essential and hard to come by.

Dinner is a 9-course menu (appetizer, 7 slices of pizza, and dessert) for JPY 18,700 (about US $ 118 at the time of this writing) and there are two wine pairing options you can choose from: four glasses of Japanese wines for JPY 9,900 and a premium wine pairing (still four course, but French and Italian wines) for JPY 17,600.

Before getting into the pizza, we started with an appetizer of tuna and turnip.

The first slice was a bianco pizza with rosemary oil and prosciutto produced in Nagano. The prosciutto was quite good.

The dough for the bianco pizza was made using Buratto flour, but the dough for the pizzas we subsequently got was made with six different types of flour.

There was a Diavolo pizza with San Marzano tomato, cherry tomato, and housemade nduja salami.

I have to say I like this pizza dough much better than the bianco. They presented the whole pizza to each of us before serving everyone one slice of each type. The classic bufala was still one of my favorites.

One of the items that are menu mainstays is the truffle pizzino. It’s a folded pizza with mascarpone, black olive paste and a generous shaving of black truffles.

I had gotten the Japanese wine pairing, and the truffle pizzino was paired with a 2024 Chateau Mercian Koshu Kiiroka from Yamanashi. It was a lovely pairing.

The seasonal slices we had included one with white beans, savoy cabbage and sofrito. The other was topped with sea asparagus, botan ebi and Bronte pistachios. The botan ebi pizza was certainly the most interesting slice we had.

There was a 7-cheese pizza which was then drizzled with truffle honey.

The final pizza was a wagyu pizza, though I felt that the cheese kind of overwhelms the wagyu here.

For dessert: affogato

The omakase at The Pizza Bar on 38th certainly comes with the Mandarin Oriental surcharge, and is probably the most expensive pizza experience in Tokyo. That said, it’s certainly worth trying once for pizza lovers.