Pizzakaya

Great service and great food. The meatballs are amazing! Wings are better than anything in California.

Very good pizza! I would definitely return for another. The owner, Derek, was very nice and gave me a bunch of good suggestions for how to enjoy the area. I ordered half pepperoni and half supreme. The ingredients were very fresh, and the crust was nice and crunchy just the way I like it. It is not like chain pizza. You can tell that they have pride in the quality of the food they serve. If you are looking for pizza in Tokyo, especially if you are in the Roppingi area, give it a try!

I stopped going because every time I’ve gone they’ve had an unannounced private party or an unpublished change in opening and closing hours. Good thing they have a takeout business, because they’ve lost the support of the rest of us locals.

I was so skeptical about eating pizza in Tokyo but I went here with some coworkers (one of them doesn’t really eat exotic foods).
The pizza and the other food was pretty good! I’m impressed and I normally don’t eat a lot of pizza. The white pizza wasn’t what i think of in the US but their version was very good still. I added pepperoni to the pizza and it was perfect!
The garlic knots were very good although a bit hot to eat at first!
The orange blossom cocktail was delicious as well.

Tokyo as a city has the best pizza you can find anywhere in the world outside of Naples. This is one of my favourite truths of living here — the pizza in this city is beyond world class, it is astounding. Pizzakaya fails to perform on this statement. Sure, I know this is «American» style pizza, however pizza is still pizza — and Pizzakaya shouldn’t come in a list of the top 20 pizza joints in Tokyo.
The craft beer is nice, the staff are friendly but for a real pizza experience go to Da Isa, Pizza Strada, Savoy or Da Michele and have your tastebuds blown off — unless you really want to be reminded of how pizza should be back home in small town USA of course.

As soon as I enter this joint, it gives me an urge to pump up my fist and go «‘Murica! F – k yeah!»
Difference between Italian and American pizza may be subtle, but is it the crust? thickness of the slice? toppings? There’s something makes me feel «America» strong on every 5 senses.
Sure, there are lots of good pizza available in Japan. But I always get mildly disappointed by their portion.
But when I order large pizza here? It’s «American» large (it’s regular large in my book, however).
Not just their size is what makes this place great, but also, chewiness of pie as well as wide variety of toppings (My favorites are «Santa Fe» Pizza — lime chicken, caramelized onions topped with guacamole and «Big Russell Pizza» — Pepperoni, ham, bacon our homemade sausage and their custom made flamin’ Hell Sausage).
And there have wide variety of craft beers…
Therefore it’s a great place whenever I need to get a fix of ‘Murica.

i typically get delivery from here. only place in tokyo that i know of where you can get an american style pie. a little saltier and oilier than i’d prefer, but taste is definitely solid and the menu is pretty diverse and creative. i would have given them 4 stars, but delivery often takes more than an hour and tonight they sent me a cold pizza…

FIRST THE BAD NEWS: Full disclosure upfront: I am somewhere to the right of Vlad the Impaler, and a Business, Finance, and Operations Management Professor. So businesses run by slackster hippies tend to wrankle my fur.
I also detest California-​style Pizza as neither fish (New York) nor fowl (Chicago) nor between (New Haven? Sicilian? Memphis-​style…).
Pizzakaya in Roponggi, Tokyo is run by guys so stoned I thought I was going to get a Cambodian «Happy Herb» pizza by accident. Their organization skills left me wondering if I was ever going to get a hit off the bong as they were «prepin’ «for the evening (7 p.m., July 16, 2014).
These guys have the kitchen organization skills even Anothny Bourdain would fire in a heartbeat. Example: cutting the pizza, then re-​assembling it in the box slice-​by-​slice in a pre-​assembled box. Time = 2 minutes, 30 seconds. Solution: put pizza on unassembled box-​flat. Slice. Assemble box around pizza. Time = 30 seconds.
BUT…
The GOOD NEWS: they do some things right. And by that I mean VERY RIGHT.
First, their base tomato sauce is nothing but Italian canned pizza tomatoes (on my night San Morino), hit with a blender, and a little salt. Nada else.
Second, their cheese is okay. In a country (Japan) that doesn’t get cheese, this is a good thing. The mozzarella, which could have used a little more pressing for moisture, was decent for a pizza, but not real Neapolitan style. Again, California…“cheese» means «EXTRA cheese.»
Basil was fresh. In a country obsessed with freshness, I give them neutral points on not messing this up. Must have put the bong down for a minute and paid attention at the greens market.
I’d like to say the homemade, two-​day aged, pizza dough was the star here… chewy, bready, pizza-​y, but slightly undercooked so the crust was more like an unsalted pretzel. It was really tasty dough, just bordering on pizza dough though, it was almost a full-​on thin bread dough.
Heat is the problem (see below). The top is okay done, and the peripheral crust puffs to nice, bready, chewy pizza bones, but the bottom and center is still underdone on the dough, due to the method… A TRACTOR COOKER THROUGH AN OVEN OPEN AT EACH END. It just cannot get hot enough. So the dough, while a work of love and tasty comes in second to…
…the house made sausage… that was sublime. The good thing about getting the munchies when you are stoned all the time is eventually you come across some KILLER recipes, and that is the case with Pizzakaya’s homemade sausage. Really, it is worth coming across town for because I believe they grind it with the spices fresh just an hour before they start making pizza with it. Throw that hot salami away!!! Gimme more of that sweat, hot, savory homemade sausage. My wife could not finish her last slice, but proceeded to pick the sausage, even the tiniest morsels, off the rest of the pizza before I could finish mine! ORDER ANY PIZZA WITH SAUSAGE!
Salads are massive and artfully arranged, bordering on Ikebana. The «garlic marbles» were popular, but I did not try them, but who doesn’t like any take on garlic bread? Wings, fries, and chips and dip round out the standard appetizers, with homemade (!) meatballs, babaganouche and roast vegetables being the nods to their off kilter hippie roots and otaku esthetic.
Beers are great and variable, and fabulously selected… as you’d expect of esthete stoners. Really, for a small place this is a superb (seasonally variable) beer list. Sodas and cold drinks include some kid-​friendly standards that parents also like (juices) as well as unusual offerings for a pizza place (ginger ale, some sort of canned «hemp“[winkwink]-based concoction… etc.).
Which brings us to the only problem: Pizzakaya is on the second floor of a tiny building with low ceilings. This is a common enough scene in Tokyo. However, with a massive pizza oven cranking for the full house, and the inevitable bits dropping into the furnace of the tractor oven, the place was SMOKY. Ventilation, even with the air-​conditioning cranking, was poor. Smoke rises, so when you are sitting down you don’t notice it so much, but if you stand up and are taller than 5′ 9», you get a lungful of dough-​burn, without the sweet burst of nicotine. You’d have to be stoned out of your skull not to notice [see comments above].
The décor is delightful, with eclectic detritus from Otaku-​land. The film cheesecake poster of «Batwoman» «is right next to a shelf of «New In Box» Star Wars Toys straight from an otaku-​collectibles market. Vintage movie posters and cheesy advertising reprints («More Doctors smoke Camels… the healthful cigarette…»), skewed to both whimsy and male-​fantasy. It is delightful. Booths and tables are comfortable, …spacious even for Tokyo. Bathrooms were clean, tiny, but clean.
For authentic California style pizza with BEER (!) and a pleasant atmosphere and helpful, friendly, and mellow staff, Pizzakaya is the top choice in To