Address Tokyo-to, Chiyoda-ku, Kanda Surugadai 3-11 Opening hours - 11:30 to 2:30 and 5:00 to 10:00. Closed on Sundays and holidays Map - Yes Telephone 3293-5855 Menu - In Italian and Japanese CC - OK.

I grew up in Ferrara, now a small city in the Northern Italian countryside, but in the Middle Ages the capital of a state of considerable power: you can tell from the way it looks, old and majestic, its cobblestone streets hardly changed from back then, and from the huge castle at its center, complete with a moat with fish, draw-bridges, towers and the rest, amazing to look at even to an Italian.

Some time ago I was looking for I don't even remember what in the Tokyo Food Page's search engine when I saw the name Ferrara: I of course made immediate plans to visit the place, because it's not every day that one finds his home town on the Net. And last Monday I went.

Very close to Ochanomizu station, a station I normally would not associate with anything particularly pleasant, Ristorante Pizzeria Ferrara is however surrounded by tall trees, and this should make eating at its tables in the garden a pleasure in a few months. The restaurant itself has a strange shape, long and narrow with marble columns here and there. After sitting down you realize they are in plastic, but it's too late, as they have already produced their effect and the room, in spite of Ochanomizu right outside the door, does have a little of the atmosphere of a Ferraran restaurant.

Stylish but not pretentious, Ferrara leaves plenty of space between tables to let one relax and choose something good from the menu. Let's be frank (pardon the pun): it's expensive (especially the main dishes, all around 3000 yen each) and definitely not the restaurant you go to every week. On the other hand, if you can forget all hopes to get away with anything less than a bill of about five thousand yen apiece (and that's a conservative estimate) the dinner will surely be worth the money in terms of both food and atmosphere. I don't mind paying for quality. You can order à-la-carte or one of three sets costing 3500, 5000 and 6000 yen each. There are also 20 kinds of pizzas, but they are papery in texture and fairly bland, so I recommend to concentrate on the rest of the list. The wine menu includes 10 whites and ten reds from all over the country at average prices.

I ordered appetizers, lasagne ferraresi, and a pizza, while the one and only love of my life had the 5000 yen set, for which she chose appetizers, spaghetti with shrimps, and grilled fish. Ferrara's cook spent well the years he lived and worked in Ferrara: the appetizers were superb and a pleasure to look at, the grilled fish perfect, the spaghetti lovely. He might be Japanese, but cooks as an Italian. Too bad for the pizza, really disappointing, but even so Ferrara is as good or better than any Italian restaurant in Tokyo I can think of. It is surpassed only by Al Doge, my personal favorite among high class restaurants.