Why you should experience Grip in Tokyo, Japan.
Grip is a convivial Italian restaurant where Minami-Ikebukuro's independent dining culture, producer-driven cooking, natural wine and two decades of local restaurant entrepreneurship converge along the neighborhood's Higashi-dori.
Set along Higashi-dori near Minami-Ikebukuro Park and just steps from Zoshigaya Kishimojindo Temple, the restaurant works with Japanese produce, seafood and meat through Italian preparations that keep individual ingredients clearly recognizable. Charcoal cooking, fresh pasta and seasonal vegetables move dinner between concentrated browning and lighter compositions before natural wine extends the progression through the evening. A streetside terrace gives the restaurant an unusually open relationship with this quieter southeastern edge of Ikebukuro. The result is a Minami-Ikebukuro restaurant where careful sourcing and direct Italian cooking remain closely connected to the neighborhood in which Shinya Kaneko began building his restaurant company in 2005.
What you should know about Grip.
Grip is best known for beginning in 2005 as the first restaurant of Shinya Kaneko's Grip Second, a company that subsequently built an unusually concentrated collection of independent dining concepts around Ikebukuro. Kaneko, born in Kanuma, Tochigi Prefecture in 1972, had competed as a basketball player in Japan and Asia and represented Japan before leaving the sport and traveling through New York and Europe, experiences that redirected him toward hospitality. He returned to Japan and founded the business on January 18, 2005, opening Dining Grip on Ikebukuro's Higashi-dori that year. Racines Boulangerie & Bistro followed nearby in 2009, beginning a second restaurant lineage that became increasingly important to the company. Grip temporarily closed in 2014 when its building was replaced, then returned after a two-and-a-half-year absence on June 27, 2016. That same year Kaneko's company took another major step in Minami-Ikebukuro with Racines Farm to Park, extending its presence into the newly reopened Minami-Ikebukuro Park; the project later received the 2017 Good Design Award and 2018 Japanese Institute of Landscape Architecture award. Grip consequently sits at the beginning of a twenty-year progression through which Kaneko turned one Higashi-dori restaurant into a wider group with relationships spanning more than sixty producers across Japan.
Charcoal-grilled Japanese beef gives the kitchen its deepest register, using direct heat to build a dark exterior before the cut reaches the table with its interior juices intact. Fresh pomodoro pasta shifts the meal toward acidity and sweetness through Aiko tomatoes and fermented butter, letting a compact combination carry the plate. Seafood changes with the catch: Choshi sea bass can meet chrysanthemum greens and bottarga in peperoncino, and Hokkaido clams move into vongole rosso with fruit tomatoes. Seasonal vegetables provide the connecting rhythm, arriving from producers across Japan and changing the composition as harvests move through the year. Grip keeps those ingredients legible from plate to plate, using charcoal, pasta and restrained sauces to make the source product carry the meal.
How to fold Grip into your trip.
Grip works as the meal anchor for an afternoon tracing the quieter southern side of Ikebukuro through early twentieth-century education, American residential architecture and the literary history preserved around Zoshigaya.
Begin at Jiyu Gakuen Myonichikan, built in 1921 for Motoko and Yoshikazu Hani's new school after Arata Endo introduced the couple to Frank Lloyd Wright, whose low horizontal design joined geometric windows with the educational principles of the founders. Continue to Zoshigaya Old Missionary House, built in 1907 for American missionary John Moody McCaleb, whose Carpenter Gothic residence preserves clapboard siding and other features associated with late nineteenth-century American suburban houses. Conclude at Zoshigaya Cemetery, opened as a Shinto burial ground in 1872 and converted to a public cemetery in 1874, where Natsume Soseki, Lafcadio Hearn, Kyoka Izumi, Kafu Nagai and Yumeji Takehisa are buried across 100,000 square meters. The progression moves from Wright and Endo's architecture of progressive education through McCaleb's American residence into the resting place of writers who shaped modern Japanese literature, exposing a century of cultural history beyond Ikebukuro's commercial core.
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