Why you should experience ELMO+ Tokyo in Tokyo, Japan.
ELMO+ Tokyo is a convivial Italian restaurant where Sasazuka's neighborhood character, Hakodate seafood, Mediterranean cooking and Hokkaido produce converge beneath the Keio railway beside one of western Tokyo's historic transport corridors.
Set inside Keio Crown Street Sasazuka near Koshu Kaido and just steps from the Tamagawa Josui Old Waterway Greenway, the restaurant draws its strongest culinary character from seafood sent from Hakodate and seasonal ingredients selected across Hokkaido. Fish and shellfish move through carpaccio, fritto and stock-driven rice preparations before charcoal cooking brings deeper concentration to the meat side of the kitchen. Japanese ingredients enter those Italian foundations without making the cooking feel conceptually strained, giving seafood, rice, pasta and wine room to develop through familiar techniques. The result is a Sasazuka restaurant where Hokkaido sourcing and Italian cooking meet with enough precision to give a neighborhood dining room a character of its own.
What you should know about ELMO+ Tokyo.
ELMO+ Tokyo is best known for opening on December 1, 2022 as the second ELMO restaurant, extending a Hakodate-focused Italian concept that Softline had introduced in Kichijoji on February 3, 2020. The original ELMO built its cooking around fish shipped directly from Hakodate, where the meeting of several marine environments produces an unusually broad seasonal catch, and the team developed relationships with suppliers including Maruhira Kawamura Suisan. Before the Sasazuka opening, ELMO staff traveled to Hakodate in September 2022, visiting the morning fish auction and Kawamura Suisan to study local species and butchery techniques; the trip followed an earlier Hakodate visit made by the founding Kichijoji team before its 2020 debut. ELMO+ carried that seafood lineage into a larger second restaurant at Keio Crown Street Sasazuka, retaining Hakodate fish but widening the formula through Japanese accents, Hokkaido meat and a substantial Italian wine selection. The Sasazuka kitchen subsequently sharpened its own direction around the idea of cooking aroma into the meal, with stock-cooked donabe paella becoming a house specialty and more than fifty Italian wines supporting the food. The progression from the 2020 Kichijoji opening through direct relationships in Hakodate to the December 2022 Sasazuka expansion gives ELMO+ a concrete culinary lineage extending well beyond the usual second-location story.
Donabe paella concentrates that lineage into the restaurant's clearest signature, cooking rice to order in house stock so seafood flavor penetrates the grains before shiso and citrus lift the steam released when the lid opens. Charcoal-grilled Hokkaido beef takes the meal toward darker roasting and rendered fat, creating a natural shift after the marine sweetness and stock-rich rice. Fresh pasta supplies a softer middle register, its chewy texture carrying seasonal sauces without competing with the stronger flavors surrounding it. Pizza introduces blistered dough and browned edges before seafood preparations return the meal toward the Hakodate catch that originally shaped ELMO. ELMO+ is most distinctive when those changes remain connected, moving from seafood and stock through charcoal and fresh pasta before wine draws the separate preparations into one sustained Italian meal built around Hokkaido ingredients.
How to fold ELMO+ Tokyo into your trip.
ELMO+ Tokyo works as the meal anchor for an afternoon moving east from Sasazuka through the engineering history of the Tamagawa Josui and into two cultural institutions that transformed nearby Hatsudai during the late twentieth century.
Begin at Tamagawa Josui Old Waterway Greenway, following the remains of the 43-kilometer channel excavated from Hamura to Yotsuya Okido in 1653, whose Sasazuka bends preserve traces of the extraordinary gravity-fed system that supplied Edo. Continue to Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, opened on September 9, 1999 around Kotaro Terada's collection of 4,000 postwar Japanese works, including more than 350 by abstract painter Tatsuoki Nambata and more than 280 by his son Fumio. Conclude at Tokyo Opera City Concert Hall, inaugurated on September 10, 1997 with Seiji Ozawa conducting Bach's St. Matthew Passion, its 1,632-seat oak auditorium combining Takahiko Yanagisawa's pyramidal architecture with Leo Beranek's acoustic work and Toru Takemitsu's founding artistic guidance. The progression moves from the seventeenth-century engineering that shaped Sasazuka through Terada's postwar collecting and into Takemitsu, Yanagisawa and Beranek's concert hall, revealing an unusually rich cultural corridor east of ELMO+.
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