IL GECO — Restaurant in Kyoto

What a strange place. If you are not intimidated by the twisting path through a barren-looking basement, and find the sliding door entrance, you are in a charming traditionally-furnished tea house. But the menu is only in Japanese, and the one man running the shop as host/chef/waiter doesn’t speak any English, and wouldn’t have time to help you with the menu, even if he did. So you set your Google Translate camera to work on the kanji. The ensuing struggle produces fragments of nonsense, flickering, like images from an LSD experience, intermingled with occasional strings of culinary description. Because this is a creative fusion menu, not a bunch of standard items. And then, if you can glean enough information from the coherent bits of translation, you order something. And then the cook takes long time to get it ready, because he’s just one guy, and each dish is a complex original. If you can survive all that, the food is...

Mamma mia! This restaurant is a must visit if you are interested in eating good Italian food. Don’t expect pizzas, but if you are fond of primi piatti and secondi piatti dishes, you have found the right place.

The place can only be found in a basement and the sign at the door might give you the idea that foreigners are not favored as customers, but fear not, as we were more than welcome. However you must be prepared that the menu is not available in English, which we solved by using google translate and their WIFI which they offered to us. And it is stated that the staff knows little to no English, but that did not bother us.

We can honestly say that the dishes were so good, that it felt like we were in Italy again. We even believe some chefs in Italy can learn from the cooking skills of this chef. So thank you for the...

An amazing restaurant. All the pastas are handmade in the restaurant and everything was divine. We especially loved the side of mushrooms which were incredible. my boyfriend is vegan and he had pasta with tomato and eggplant sauce and it was excellent. I had carbonara pasta which was also just. The only downside is the pricing: they charge for extra cheese when I just ordered Parmesan and they charged for water which they brought to the table and the problem was is that they didn’t inform us that we will be charged for those things so when we got the check a bit I would recommend asking the price...