Osteria CONACINETTA — Restaurant in Kyoto

This southern Italian restaurant is in a quiet, inconspicuous, residential neighborhood of Kyoto, away from the tourist traps and bustling downtown. A husband and wife prepare and serve this traditional cuisine they’ve come to love, while adding local flare in subtle ways. For instance, while squid is common in Italy, they use red octopus, which is more common in the Pacific. They offer a Wagyu steak option, which could never be found in an Italian menu in Puglia, but makes sense in Kyoto, whose proximity to Kobe provides access to high quality beef.

My wife and I went on May 28, 2024. We were staying nearby, and when we saw a southern Italian restaurant on the map, we had to try it out because of my ancestry. We expected it to be kitschy and filled with foreigners, but were surprised to see tasteful decor, a lovely atmosphere, and plenty of people who were twirling pasta, sipping wine, and speaking Japanese.

Their pasta was fantastic and their steak, delicious, but the two tests I use to gauge an Italian restaurant are the bread and the house wines. I expect main courses to be prepared well, but how a restaurant prepares its bread shows attention to detail, and by choosing nice house wines you know that they take pride in the entire experience of a meal. Here, both were excellent, and refreshingly unprerentious.

I almost never write reviews, because who am I? I am not a trained chef and certainly not a renowned food critic. But as I was dining that night, I felt inspired to write a review, and began taking notes. It took me several days to compile them into what you are reading now, and as I sit in my hotel room about to depart Japan, I feel such contentment that I was able to experience this couple’s love for Italian cuisine — the food of my people — and their desire to share it with people in their own community. After a long day of adventuring in an entirely new world, my wife and I were able to share a night with familiar food prepared wonderfully, 5000 miles away from...

The food was fine, but at every turn the server gave us the impression that we should consider ourselves lucky to be served, to the point of being rude at times. (I speak Japanese, so it's not a language thing.) And such a weird policy: if you order the house wine, you don't get wine glasses, but instead thick water tumblers like you'd fine at a 100-yen store. They're a step up from paper cups, but it just makes the whole experience feel cheep. If the goal is to encourage one to buy more-expensive wines, it fails because it just makes me want to...

Buonissimo! An authentic experience, the food is really fresh and even though we ate so many things it didn’t feel heavy on the stomach. Beautiful food cooked like a nonna would, also they have very special regional things that even in italy are hard to find. For those complaining about the house wine served in regular glasses, in Italy osterie/trattorie always serve it in...