There's a new trend in San Francisco's Italian restaurant boom: fusion
Chef Marco Avila ignites the fiorentina al fuoco at a table at Ciaorigato in San Francisco. (Kelsey McClellan/For the S.F. Chronicle)
At Acquolina in North Beach, executive chef and co-owner Marco Avila prepares dishes like wild boar with a tomato-olive sauce and cacio e pepe tossed in a cheese wheel according to a strict Italian sensibility.
But Avila, who was born in Mexico and raised on the Tuscan coast, always wanted to feature both sides of his upbringing at a restaurant. At Modi, an Italian-Mexican spot at the foot of the Salesforce Tower, he has finally put dishes he once prepared just for himself, such as spaghetti with clams and chorizo, on a menu for the first time. "I was always wanting to do a fusion thing for Acquolina, but I couldn't," Avila said.
Amidst a larger Italian restaurant boom over the past year, Italian fusion restaurants have taken hold in San Francisco, folding elements of world cuisines into foundational Italian dishes to create combinations that may be novel to some local diners. The most recent arrivals include Japanese-Italian spots Ciaorigato in Union Square, also from Avila and his team, and Ama by Brad Kilgore at the foot of the TransAmerica Pyramid, but the wave goes back to November 2024, with the opening of Modi and the Argentinian-infused Morella.
Ciaorigato, the second Italian fusion restaurant from chef Marco Vaila, combines Japanese and Italian. (Kelsey McClellan/For the S.F. Chronicle)
Italian fusion dishes are far from new. Itameshi, the combination of Japanese and Italian cuisine, is more than a century old. On the Bridge, a Japantown restaurant beloved by rock icon Patti Smith, has been serving classics of the genre, such as spaghetti topped with roe, for more than three decades. More modern Asian restaurants have also put their twist on Italian food, with Mission Chinese offering a Sichuan carbonara, while Jilli, the hip Korean rice wine den, serves a popular rigatoni in a kimchi vodka sauce. On the Peruvian side of things - which has its own tradition of Japanese fusion, Nikkei cuisine - the upscale La Mar offers cebiches with creamed sunchoke and liver oil, while pesto pasta with aji amarillo sauce is a popular item at the hit rotisserie Roosters.
Avila, who splits his time between three restaurants, may be San Francisco's most obvious conduit for channeling the combination of Italian and Mexican cuisines. Still, Mexican-Italian fusion was not an easy sell to his four Italian business partners. "That's how Italians can be," he said. "They don't really like to change things."
Davide Tringali, one of Avila's business partners, admits the team was skeptical of the idea of merging Mexican and Italian food, but was ultimately won over after tasting the dishes, such as a butterflied branzino, one half covered in pesto and the other in achiote, and lasagna layered with a beef birria that's simmered for more than eight hours. Riffing on the culturally divisive ham-and-pineapple pizza, Avila came up with a pineapple salsa that's drizzled onto a pizza topped with al pastor-style pork. (In general, though, he's not in favor of adding fresh fruit to pizza. "You have to be respectful of the traditions, but still try to do things differently," Avila said.)
A successful start at Modi, which drew impressive lunch and dinner crowds, gave Avila's partners confidence to move forward with a second Italian fusion project, Ciaorigato. "We live in a fusion city," Tringali said. "It's multicultural, diverse. People can appreciate this."
Diners in the bar section of Ciaorigato, which uses crudo as a bridge between Japanese and Italian cuisine. (Kelsey McClellan/For the S.F. Chronicle)
At Ciaorigato, which opened in June, Avila explores the boundaries of Japanese-Italian with dishes such as a tagliatelle in an uni-enriched cream sauce and sushi offerings that incorporate burrata or portobello mushrooms. Avila says that crudos offer a natural bridge between the two cuisines, as seen in his hamachi with green parsley oil and pickled daikon. He also has a spin on shokupan, Japanese milk bread, that treats it like focaccia, with olive oil and herbs kneaded into the base.
In September, Miami chef Brad Kilgore opened his Japanese-Italian restaurant, Ama by Brad Kilgore, at the foot of the iconic TransAmerica Pyramid. It's the latest from the restaurateur and Michael Shvo, the developer trying to reinvigorate the iconic property, who have previously opened Cafe Sebastian and shaved ice shop MadLab; all three are within shouting distance of each other.
Kilgore says that umami is the main seam that connects his influences at Ama. He argues that respective staple ingredients, such as Parmigiano Reggiano and miso, are all defined by rich, savory flavors. He first arrived at this thesis while testing a recipe roughly 10 years ago, he says, after adding a bit of miso to a tomato sauce to see if it would intensify it. "It made the tomatoes more like their natural taste," Kilgore said. "If you think about how those flavor profiles are, hitting your tongue and marrying on the plate, fusing Italian and Japanese flavors isn't that big of a stretch to me."
(Tomatoes were a fusion selling point for Modi's Tringali as well, who noted that the fruit is native to the Americas and sees a wide variety of applications in both cuisines.)
Outside of his initial recipe test, Kilgore had seen that merging the two already popular cuisines could yield success. His friend Robbie Felice, a chef and restaurateur in New Jersey, operates fusion spot Pastaramen, which offers fusion items like a mochi noodle carbonara. He also cited famed chef David Chang's now-closed Momofuku Nishi in New York City, which incorporated East Asian influences into Italian dishes, as an influence.
At Ama by Brad Kilgore, dishes showing Kilgore's penchant for umami include steaks covered in koji, the culture used to start the fermentation process for soy sauce and sake, which spend a few days in a dry ager to bolster the beef's flavors. Arancini, Sicilian rice balls, are stuffed with a shiitake-and-cheese cream spiked with tamari, a thick soy sauce. "You get this pop of umami in the center," he said.
Pastas include a radiatore Bolognese with a sauce made from pepperoni and maitake mushrooms, and a "puttanesca" agnolotti, its small pasta pickets filled with cured olives and bathed in an uni fondue. Kilgore said that he normally tries to limit the menu to three pasta dishes, though in an age of ever-increasing food costs, adding more pastas is always tempting, given their higher profit margins. "To keep some of the prices reasonable, you have to offset them with pasta," he said.
Bucatini with tsukune curry at Ciaorigato, an Italian-Japanese restaurant in San Francisco. (Kelsey McClellan/For the S.F. Chronicle)
Over at Modi and Ciaorigato, Tringali agrees that pastas help in menu prices, but worries about how they might affect the perception of the restaurant.
"We don't want it to feel like the Italian presence is stronger than Mexican or Japanese," he said. "Otherwise we would have just opened an Italian pasta restaurant."
