Address - Kamakura-shi, Hase 1-14-26 Opening hours -LUNCH 11:30-14:00 DINNER 17:30-20:30 (LO) Map - No
Telephone - 0467-24-3007 Menu - Only in Japanese CC - No Photo - Yes: Door and Garden

Some restaurants immediately stand out among the others because it's obvious they aren't in business just for the money. Hase's Italian restaurant Nadia is a excellent example of the kind: elegant and stylish because of good taste rather than big money, it occupies a magnificently renovated Japanese house and refuses to advertise itself: not only is its door unmarked by a sign, but once inside you won’t see Kirin, Sapporo or other logos, just fresh and dried flowers unobtrusively placed. But its elegance isn't snobbishness and you don't feel any pressure to conform: I was wearing jeans and flip flops (as usual), yet I felt perfectly at ease.

The menu impresses you right away with its originality and the utter lack of time savers (lifelines to a busy cooks) like tomato sauce spaghetti and the like. It's all labor-intensive stuff like risottos and grilled vegetables. The cook, who looks like a child even to an old Asia hand like me (why be modest?), is perennially dripping sweat while she jumps from one corner of the kitchen to another.

And, guess what, if you have the 3800 yen set, you can choose one each of those elaborate antipasti, primi and secondi.

With that kind of choice,  Nadia would be a great find if it wasn't for the food's many and strange flaws, the first being without the shadow of a doubt the excessive parsimony in the use of salt. My better half agrees with me, and she is Japanese.

On top of that, there was no salt on the table, something I despise in any restaurant, and particularly in an Italian one. Salt, like that of the existence of god, is too personal a problem to be entrusted to others.

Interestingly, several local Web reviewers accuse her of the opposite crime: she might therefore just be overreacting.

I ordered with joy the risotto with artichokes: I haven't even SEEN an artichoke in this country. Alas, she put in it whole artichoke leaves, something you shouldn't do because inside they are very tough. Usually, after boiling them you remove their pulp and ditch the rest. The last problem with that risotto (which by the way looked really gorgeous) was the absence of parmesan either on the risotto itself or on the table. If you want to call yourself an Italian restaurant, you must remember that risotto simply cannot exist without parmesan on top. Period. The mother of all risottos, Risotto alla parmigiana, contains just rice and parmesan.

The Milanese (a.k.a. Wiener Schnitzel) was oily and she hadn't thought of removing the fat parts. A sheet of kitchen paper and a wise cut of her knife would have made a huge difference.

And so it went. It's just too bad, because so much effort deserves some reward, but it's clear to me that her skills as a cook are still immature and she needs someone (like me) looking over her shoulder to tell her about those all-important details that, in the complex recipes she chooses to create, she misses.

June '04