Chef Kenji Kawamura honed his craft in Italy for six years before returning to his hometown in Ibaraki Prefecture to open Nonna Nietta. | TAKAO OHTA
Aug 2, 2026
Tsukuba, Ibaraki Pref. – No matter how you make your way to Nonna Nietta, there will be a moment when you realize you’re getting very close — a moment you know you’re absolutely in the right place.
Whether you’ve stepped out of a taxi or schlepped it through a tangle of residential backstreets from the nearest bus stop, it’s the instant at which your nostrils are tickled with the aroma of woodsmoke — reassuring, welcoming, appetizing. From this point on, you can let your eyes take over.
Just look for the two-story, freestanding house on the street corner that seems like it doesn’t quite fit in. The one with old-fashioned features, herbs growing profusely, semi-wild, in place of a neatly clipped garden and a gravel parking lot rather than a designer carport. The one that seems like it had been standing there for decades before it got hemmed in by suburbia.
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