Why you should experience Seirinkan in Tokyo, Japan.
Seirinkan is a fiercely individual pizzeria where Kamimeguro's independent character, wood-fired Neapolitan technique, wrought-iron architecture and Susumu Kakinuma's uncompromising minimalism converge inside one of Tokyo's most influential pizza rooms.
Set along a narrow Kamimeguro lane near Meguro Ginza Shopping Street and just steps from Nakameguro Station, Seirinkan rises through three slender floors wrapped around a black iron spiral staircase, with the oven exposed beside the first-floor counter and dining rooms stacked overhead. Iron artist Mitsuo Kurata shaped the building through dark metal and aged wood, while red curtains, church-like chairs and mechanical forms give the interior the theatrical atmosphere Kakinuma wanted from the space. The vertical plan sends pizzas upward from the oven through a room closer to an eccentric stage set than a conventional Italian restaurant. The result is an unmistakable Kamimeguro pizzeria where fire, iron, music and architecture turn a meal into an experience conceived as completely as the pizza itself.
What you should know about Seirinkan.
Seirinkan is best known for Susumu Kakinuma, whose fascination with pizza began at 18 or 19 after watching John Travolta eat a slice while walking through New York in Saturday Night Fever, years before Kakinuma became one of the formative figures in Tokyo's Neapolitan pizza movement. His first trip to Italy in the 1980s had nothing to do with professional pizza training, but he returned in 1994 determined to learn in Naples and spent a year eating across the city after local pizzaioli declined to teach him their methods. Kakinuma came home and opened Nakameguro Savoy on April 20, 1995, entering a Tokyo pizza scene still dominated by thinner Roman-style pies and building his own interpretation from the flavors and techniques he had absorbed. Savoy became Seirinkan on June 6, 2007, while Kakinuma's influence spread through cooks including Tsubasa Tamaki, who spent years training under him before founding Pizza Studio Tamaki and carrying the lineage into another generation of Tokyo pizza. Kakinuma expanded his own work with Pizzaman in Oimachi in 2010 and joined relief efforts after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, serving pizza to earthquake and tsunami evacuees. His international reach took another step in February 2026 when he cooked his first New York residency at Sake No Hana on the Lower East Side, bringing the style he had developed in Nakameguro back to the city whose Saturday Night Fever street scene had first put pizza in his imagination decades earlier.
Margherita and marinara remain the center of Kakinuma's cooking, a deliberately narrow choice intended to direct attention toward fermented dough. The margherita carries tomato, mozzarella and basil across a thin center surrounded by an inflated rim, while the marinara strips the formula further to tomato, garlic, oregano and olive oil. Kakinuma's characteristic salt punch adds seasoning around the baking process, and the fiercely heated wood-fired oven can finish a pie in less than a minute, blistering the exterior while preserving pliability through the center. Tabelog selected Seirinkan for its Pizza Tokyo Top 100 in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2023 and 2025, recognition for a restaurant whose two foundational pizzas have remained intact while the Tokyo school that grew around Kakinuma has spread far beyond Nakameguro.
How to fold Seirinkan into your trip.
Seirinkan works as the meal within an afternoon tracing Nakameguro through a preserved modern residence, the river that defines the district and a former railway structure reclaimed for contemporary city use.
Begin at Kyu Asakura House, completed in 1919 for Torajiro Asakura and preserved with its early Taisho-period house and sloping garden, providing an intimate architectural record from the years before Nakameguro became synonymous with contemporary dining and design. Continue to Meguro River, whose banks form the geographic spine of the neighborhood and carry one of Tokyo's best-known concentrations of cherry trees through the dense streets south of the station. Conclude at Nakameguro Koukashita, created beneath 700 meters of elevated Tokyu Toyoko Line track after the railway was reconfigured through the station area, bringing shops and restaurants into infrastructure once treated primarily as residual urban space. The sequence moves from a Taisho-era home through the river corridor into reclaimed railway architecture before Seirinkan supplies another piece of Nakameguro reinvention: Kakinuma turning an American movie memory, a year of eating in Naples and decades of personal experimentation into a school of pizza now recognized far beyond Tokyo.
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