Why you should experience Pizzeria Tonino in Tokyo, Japan.
Pizzeria Tonino is a spirited Neapolitan pizzeria where Shimotakaido's market-town character, Antonio Di Massa's childhood in Naples, wood-fired pizza and southern Italian cooking have anchored a piece of Campania beside the Setagaya Line for more than two decades.
Set near Shimotakaido Station and just steps from the neighborhood's long-running shopping streets, the restaurant carries forward the pizzeria Di Massa opened here in 2003 before relocating across the station in 2022. A wood-fired oven drives the cooking, sending blistered pizzas to the table with swollen cornicioni, charred patches and soft centers designed to be eaten. Pasta, antipasti and southern Italian dishes extend the meal beyond pizza, preserving the broader restaurant culture Di Massa brought from his native Naples. The result is a Shimotakaido pizzeria where a Neapolitan pizzaiolo's childhood craft has matured into one of the neighborhood's enduring culinary signatures.
What you should know about Pizzeria Tonino.
Pizzeria Tonino is best known for Antonio Di Massa, a Naples-raised pizzaiolo who began making pizza at seven, later worked at La Piccola Tavola in Eifukucho and opened his own Shimotakaido restaurant on May 31, 2003. Di Massa built the restaurant around the cooking of his birthplace, placing Neapolitan pizza at the center while treating the pizzeria as a vehicle for carrying the food of southern Italy into his adopted Tokyo neighborhood. Recognition from Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana followed on April 20, 2009, when the organization registered Pizzeria Tonino as certified pizzeria No. 297, placing Di Massa's work within the Naples-based association devoted to codifying authentic Neapolitan pizza. The restaurant became sufficiently tied to Shimotakaido that TV Tokyo featured Di Massa and his Neapolitan upbringing during a 2011 Adomachi episode devoted to the Setagaya Line, drawing a direct parallel between the tram passing his dining room and the streetcars of Naples. A major physical change arrived in 2022 when railway work prompted the original restaurant's relocation to the north side of Shimotakaido Station, preserving the business within the same neighborhood after nearly two decades at its first address.
Pizza reaches the table seconds after the oven has inflated its rim, leaving charred freckles across a crust whose exterior gives way to a softer, elastic interior beneath tomato, mozzarella and olive oil. The Margherita keeps that structure exposed through tomato acidity, melted cheese and basil, allowing the fermented dough and wood-fired heat to remain central to the mouthful. Richer combinations add cured meat, cheese or vegetables without abandoning the Neapolitan balance between a pliable center and raised cornicione, while antipasti and pasta carry the table deeper into Di Massa's southern Italian repertoire. Pizzeria Tonino draws its culinary character from that continuity between Naples and Shimotakaido, preserving the pizza craft Di Massa first learned as a child and later brought into his own Tokyo dining room.
How to fold Pizzeria Tonino into your trip.
Pizzeria Tonino works as the meal destination within a Shimotakaido route connecting Edo-period learning, among Tokyo's surviving tramways and the independent cinema that has kept repertory film culture alive beside the station.
Begin at Sugawara Shrine, founded in 1665 when Terakoya teacher Ishii Hyosuke Naoyoshi enshrined scholar Sugawara no Michizane, with surviving strength stones recalling competitions held by local young men during the Edo and Meiji eras. Continue aboard Setagaya Line, whose Setagaya-to-Shimotakaido section opened on May 1, 1925 as part of Tamagawa Electric Railway's Shimotakaido Line, leaving the neighborhood at the terminus of one of Tokyo's surviving tram routes. Conclude at Shimotakaido Cinema, a 126-seat theater two minutes from the station whose changing daily program moves between Japanese films, international releases, major productions and art-house work. The progression carries Shimotakaido through seventeenth-century education, a century of tram history and independent film culture before Pizzeria Tonino closes the route with the Neapolitan cooking Di Massa brought to the neighborhood in 2003.
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