Why you should experience Due Italian in Tokyo, Japan.
Due Italian is an inventive ramen restaurant where Ichigaya's restrained dining culture, Kazuo Ishizuka's Italian training, Minoru Sano's ramen discipline and an unconventional cheese-driven signature converge in a bowl conceived like a complete meal.
Set along Yasukuni-dori near Ichigaya Station and just steps from Sotobori Park, the restaurant brings Ishizuka's decades in restaurant kitchens to a format built around clear chicken broth, wheat noodles and ingredients more readily associated with Italian cooking. Cheese, prosciutto and lemon enter ramen without erasing the underlying Japanese structure, giving familiar components distinctly different roles as the bowl develops. Ramen Fromage carries that approach furthest by allowing the remaining cheese-enriched broth to continue into rice after the noodles are finished. The result is an Ichigaya restaurant where an Italian chef's encounter with one of modern ramen's most influential figures produced a genuinely individual branch of Tokyo ramen.
What you should know about Due Italian.
Due Italian is best known for Kazuo Ishizuka's transition from a 25-year career in Italian cooking into ramen after meeting Shina Soba-ya founder Minoru Sano through the television program Gachinko! in 2002. Ishizuka had entered professional kitchens at 17, eventually becoming an independent chef and owner of six restaurants before the encounter with Sano redirected his career. The Due name followed that reinvention: due means two in Italian, carrying Ishizuka's idea of ramen as a second life after his Italian career. He brought the concept to Ichigaya on April 1, 2009, opening Ramen-do Due Italian on Yasukuni-dori after earlier iterations of the business elsewhere. The restaurant subsequently earned a MICHELIN Guide Tokyo Bib Gourmand for three consecutive editions from 2015 through 2017, placing Ishizuka's Italian-inflected cooking inside the period when ramen first entered MICHELIN's Tokyo selections. Ramen Fromage became the clearest culinary signature of the project, joining ramen with cheese and a finishing portion of rice under Ishizuka's ambition to construct a full-course progression inside one bowl. Due Italian consequently traces an unusually legible chef chronology: Italian kitchens led to Ishizuka's meeting with Sano, that meeting led to a second culinary career, and the Ichigaya restaurant turned the crossover into a MICHELIN-recognized style of ramen.
Ramen Fromage begins with a clear chicken-led broth before soft cheese changes its body as the noodles are pulled through it, gradually turning the liquid richer and creamier. Prosciutto adds cured-meat depth to the same bowl, extending Ishizuka's Italian background through an ingredient that works against the lighter broth before melting cheese becomes dominant. Once the noodles disappear, Bijin Genmai rice takes their place in the remaining broth, converting the cheese-rich liquid into a risotto-like final stage and completing Ishizuka's full-course idea through a change of texture. Lemon ramen moves in the opposite direction, using citrus to sharpen the broth and expose its cleaner contours after the richness of the fromage. Due Italian makes these transitions the substance of the meal, allowing broth to move through cheese, cured meat, rice or citrus.
How to fold Due Italian into your trip.
Due Italian works as the meal anchor for an afternoon tracing the political and military history surrounding Ichigaya, moving from postwar remembrance through a surviving courtroom before reaching one of Edo Castle's most consequential gates.
Begin at Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery, established in 1959 after overseas recovery efforts begun in 1952 left Japan responsible for unidentified war dead, whose remains were gathered into a national burial complex beside the Imperial Palace moat. Continue to Ichigaya Memorial Hall, preserving sections of the 1937 Army Academy building whose grand hall became the courtroom for the International Military Tribunal for the Far East from May 1946 through November 1948 and later witnessed Yukio Mishima's final speech in 1970. Conclude at Sakuradamon Gate, where 17 Mito samurai and one Satsuma samurai attacked TairΕ Ii Naosuke on March 24, 1860 after his 1858 treaty policy and Ansei Purge intensified opposition to Tokugawa authority. The progression moves from the human aftermath of twentieth-century war through the courtroom that judged Japan's wartime leadership into the 1860 assassination that weakened the Tokugawa shogunate, exposing the exceptional concentration of modern Japanese history surrounding Ichigaya.
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