Tokyo Pizzaioli are turning out some of the finest Neapolitan pies in the world
with the state of the pizza in his new oven. Wearing his uniform of white t-shirt, faded blue jeans, and white Converse sneakers, he had stopped talking and began to watch the dough, eyeing the fire; a second too long and the pizza would be ruined. The sauce burbled, he thrust his metal pizza peel under the pie, raised it close to the low brick ceiling, flicked his wrist a few times, giving it a twirl on the end of the peel, singeing the crust like a creme brulee glaze.
Seirinkan has been located on the same block for 22 years, nestled on the south side of Nakameguro Station — the quiet side, away from the high-rise towers, the river, and bustle of the crowds. Inside, it feels vaguely religious: Seirinkan translates literally as the house of holy or sacred wood .
But Kakinuma is adamant that his pizzas aren't, in fact, Neapolitan."Absolutely not," he said."They're Kakinuma-style pizzas. Look, Japanese people are really free. What I mean by that is, Japanese pray on New Year's Day at a Shinto shrine, get married in a Christian church, and hold their funerals at a Buddhist temple. They're beholden to no single point of view.
While discussing pizza over his masterful rendition of a D.O.C. that uses buffalo mozzarella and semi-dried tomatoes, but no sauce, with pitch-perfect crust like Tamaki's and Kakinuma's — crust that has just the right amount of body, crackles on bite, is singed with patches of char, and never feels burdensome to finish — Inoue extended and generalized Kakinuma's sushi analogy. Pizza, he believes, fits snugly into the canon of Japanese food.
Kakinuma has never cut his — he sticks with Naples tradition. Tamaki cuts without hesitation."If it's a group of people, they eat the pizza in a matter of seconds," he said."I cut it to the group size — to save them time and make sure they eat it while it's as fresh and hot as possible. If I didn't cut it, it'd take longer to cut themselves. But, anyway, the dough isn't weak. It won't get soggy that fast.
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