Why you should experience Rize Mize Italian Bar in Tokyo, Japan.
Rize Mize Italian Bar is a convivial Italian hideaway where Nishi-Shinjuku's quieter backstreets, stone-oven pizza, Japanese craft beer and intimate bar culture offer a warm counterpoint to the skyscrapers rising nearby.
Set along a side street near Ome Kaido and just steps from Joenji Temple, the compact restaurant occupies the ground floor of Exeer Shinjuku, removed from the crowds surrounding the station's western exits. Brick, timber and closely arranged tables give dinner the scale of a neighborhood bar, while the stone oven places pizza at the center of a menu spanning fresh pasta, slow-cooked meat and Italian drinking food. Domestic craft beer plays an unusually prominent role, linking the taps with the kitchen and giving the restaurant a Japanese accent. The result is a Nishi-Shinjuku restaurant where pizza, wine and craft beer reward the short walk beyond the district's busiest commercial blocks.
What you should know about Rize Mize Italian Bar.
Rize Mize Italian Bar is best known for opening on November 20, 2016 from a partnership between two young hospitality professionals, pairing a chef trained through years of Italian and French cooking with a sommelier-bartender whose earlier career included prominent Roppongi nightclubs. The pairing established food and drinks as equal parts of the project, with Italian cooking supported by Japanese craft brewing and a wine program extending into bottles aged for more than ten years. Four rotating draft lines became a showcase for domestic producers, with breweries including Baird Beer in Shizuoka, Outsider Brewing in Yamanashi, Two Rabbits Brewing in Shiga and Craft Heart in Hiroshima appearing among the selections. The restaurant later earned inclusion in Shinjuku Meishuba 100, adding local recognition to a bar whose small scale contrasts sharply with the corporate towers surrounding Nishi-Shinjuku. Television and YouTube productions also began using the restaurant for filming, carrying the brick-lined dining room beyond its immediate neighborhood audience. Nearly a decade after opening, the original pairing of Italian food, wine expertise and Japanese brewing remains visible in a restaurant whose most distinctive creation literally brings beer into the pizza itself.
Pizza establishes that connection through dough kneaded with Japanese craft beer and domestic Haruyutaka wheat, producing a crust that crisps at the surface while retaining a soft, resilient chew beneath. Wagyu Bolognese lasagna deepens the meal through fresh pasta layered with beef, sauce and melted richness, moving from the dry heat of the stone oven toward something softer and denser. Six-hour red-wine-braised beef cheek pushes that progression into slow cooking, allowing collagen and wine to create a yielding texture before the meat gives way under the fork. Rize Mize completes the arc with rotating Japanese beer, aged wine and Italian cocktails, allowing the drinks to answer the same shifts between toasted dough, concentrated meat and rich sauce that structure the food.
How to fold Rize Mize Italian Bar into your trip.
Rize Mize Italian Bar works as the dinner destination after an afternoon tracing Nishi-Shinjuku through the waterworks that preceded its skyscrapers, corporate art patronage and the high-rise race that permanently changed western Tokyo's skyline.
Begin at Shinjuku Central Park, opened in 1968 on ground associated with the former Yodobashi Water Filtering Plant and planned from 1960 as part of the emerging subcenter, leaving an 88,000-square-meter green counterweight to the towers that followed. Continue to Sompo Museum of Art, founded with Seiji Togo's cooperation in 1976 before his family donated 345 works in 1978 and Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers entered the collection in 1987, radically raising the museum's international profile. Conclude at Shinjuku Sumitomo Building, completed in 1974 at more than 200 meters and briefly Japan's tallest skyscraper, with Nikken Sekkei responsible for the architecture and its triangular form becoming one of the early signatures of the new high-rise district. The progression moves from the land beneath Nishi-Shinjuku's rise through Seiji Togo and Van Gogh into the skyscraper boom before Rize Mize Italian Bar brings the evening back to street level for stone-oven pizza and Japanese craft beer.
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