Why you should experience Savoy Tomato & Cheese in Tokyo, Japan.
Savoy Tomato & Cheese is an intimate pizzeria where Azabujuban's polished neighborhood character, long-fermented dough, wood-fired heat and a ten-seat counter preserve the close-range pleasure that helped Savoy become one of Tokyo's formative pizza names.
Set along a narrow street near Azabu-dori and just steps from Azabujuban Shopping Street, Savoy Tomato & Cheese occupies a slender black-toned room designed by Glamorous in 2013, with marble, high counter seating and the pizza oven concentrated within immediate view of the dining seats. The compact plan places dough stretching, topping and firing at the center of the room, turning the pizzaiolo's movements into part of dinner while keeping the physical distance between oven and plate exceptionally short. Fresh tomato, mozzarella, flour, yeast and olive oil provide the foundation, with the kitchen adjusting water, salt, fermentation time and temperature as seasonal conditions change. The result is a focused Azabujuban pizzeria where a tiny room gives dough, fire and the pizzaiolo's hands complete control of the meal.
What you should know about Savoy Tomato & Cheese.
Savoy Tomato & Cheese is best known for carrying forward the Savoy name created by Susumu Kakinuma in 1995 while developing a separate Azabujuban chapter that opened on April 21, 2013 and is now owned by professional golfer Shingo Katayama. Kakinuma had built the original Savoy after returning from Naples, where local pizzaioli declined to formally teach him and he spent a year learning through repeated encounters with the city's pizzerias, helping establish the lineage from which several influential Tokyo pizza makers later emerged. The Azabujuban restaurant opened eighteen years after that first Savoy, with Glamorous completing its purpose-built dining interior in April 2013 and a pizzaiolo named Kaneko becoming closely associated with the counter and its thin, light, pliable dough. The restaurant subsequently established its own record of recognition, entering Tabelog's Pizza Tokyo Top 100 in 2017, 2021, 2023 and 2025. Katayama now leads the restaurant as owner after a professional golf career that produced five Japan Golf Tour money titles, including four consecutive crowns from 2004 through 2007, bringing an unusual sporting figure into the stewardship of a pizza lineage approaching its fourth decade. The current restaurant still identifies its history with Savoy's April 1995 beginning while operating from the dedicated Tomato & Cheese address established in 2013, joining Kakinuma's formative Tokyo pizza work, Kaneko's years at the oven and Katayama's present ownership within a single Azabujuban dining room.
Margherita places fresh mozzarella, tomato and basil across dough fermented for an extended period, then exposes the pizza to intense wood-fired heat until the rim develops charred blisters around a soft, elastic interior. Marinara strips the composition to tomato, garlic, oregano and olive oil, with finely sliced garlic distributed across the surface so its sweetness and pungency reach the dough. Seasonal changes in humidity and temperature prompt adjustments to water, salt, fermentation and proofing, while the oven's heat brings olive oil, tomato liquid and moisture from the dough together across the center of the pie. Vegan margherita and mushroom pizza extend the current program through plant-based cheese, while Pizza Y introduces Yamayuki tuna into a format far removed from the wholesaler's celebrated sushi clientele, giving the restaurant another ingredient-driven route beyond its foundational pies.
How to fold Savoy Tomato & Cheese into your trip.
Savoy Tomato & Cheese works as the meal within an afternoon tracing Azabujuban through nineteenth-century diplomacy, a wartime shrine merger and the real child whose short life became attached to one of Japan's enduring songs.
Begin at Azabusan Zenpukuji, founded in 824 and used from 1859 as the first United States legation in Tokyo, where Townsend Harris and his staff occupied temple buildings and figures including Yukichi Fukuzawa, Mitsui & Co. founder Takashi Masuda and industrialist Ichibei Furukawa passed through during Japan's opening to international diplomacy. Continue to Juban Inari Shrine, created after Suehiro Shrine and Takecho Inari Shrine both burned during the April 15, 1945 air raid, received adjacent replacement sites through postwar land readjustment in June 1950 and merged under the present name; its current sanctuary was rebuilt in 1997. Conclude at Kimi-chan Statue, erected at Patio Juban in 1989 for Kimi Iwasaki, the girl connected with Ujo Noguchi's Akai Kutsu, who contracted tuberculosis and died at age nine in an Azabu orphanage in 1911 without making the journey to America her mother thought she had taken. The progression moves from Townsend Harris and the upheaval of Japan's opening through Azabu's wartime destruction into the life behind a nationally familiar song before Savoy Tomato & Cheese closes the route with another piece of local continuity, a 1995 pizza lineage carried into a ten-seat Azabujuban counter in 2013.
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