In shortSelf-sufficient Italian — house wine, ham, cheese. You can book it online yourself, or our Tokyo desk can request the table for you.
Price
Omakase dinner ¥21,120 or ¥33,220 (tax & service incl.)
Hours
Dinner only — from 18:00 (last order 21:00)
Closed
Sundays and two Mondays a month
Seats
20
Private rooms
None
Payment
Cards accepted · service is included in the course price
Getting there
Hirosaki, Aomori — shinkansen to Shin-Aomori (3 hrs) + 40 min local; or fly to Aomori + 55 min bus
Party size
Solo diners accepted
Michiaki Sasamori came home from Italy in 2003 with a conviction most
chefs only talk about: if the point of Italian cooking is the
ingredient, then make the ingredients. Two decades on, his twenty‑seat
osteria (a casual Italian restaurant — the “enoteca” half means wine
house) in the castle town of Hirosaki serves prosciutto he cures
himself — salted lighter than the Italian benchmark, to his own idea
of balance — burrata pulled from Jersey milk, vegetables from his own
fields, and wine from his own vineyard on the slopes of Mt. Iwaki,
where since taking a winemaking license in 2010 he has grown
Nebbiolo, the great grape of Piedmont, alongside Malvasia and
Chardonnay in apple country at 40°N.
What you eat
An omakase — chef’s choice — of roughly eight courses where the shock
is provenance: cold spaghetti with raw squid and Aomori uni; a
charcuterie board where every slice was cured in‑house; cheese that
never saw a distributor; the wine pairing grown within sight of the
volcano on the horizon. He refuses Japanese seasonings on principle —
he has said he does not want the flavor of Italy muddied — which makes
this, paradoxically, one of the purest Italian tables in Japan. Two
courses only: ¥21,120 or ¥33,220, tax and service included.
The booking reality
Twenty seats, dinner only, closed Sundays and two Mondays a month.
The book opens three months out, and there are three doors: the
Pocket Concierge platform online (in English), the telephone in
Japanese, or the house’s own web form in Japanese — children and
full‑room lunches go through that form only. Two months’ notice is
typical. The cancellation policy is among the strictest in this
collection: 50% from
three business days out, 100% the day before or day of. That is
exactly the shape of booking where a desk earns its keep — we
confirm in Japanese, hold the details, and if your shinkansen runs
late, we phone the house for you straight away.
You can book it online yourself, or our Tokyo desk can request it for you. Request this table →
Go if you
Travel wine‑first, wonder what terroir means in snow country, or are
building a Tohoku loop anyway — Hirosaki gives you the castle with
Japan’s most photographed cherry moat and the Shirakami beech forests,
and harvest season (September–October), when vineyard and orchards
peak together, is the window.
Free release-date alerts: the day before, on the morning of release day (08:00 JST) and about 30 minutes before when the time is known — or a weekly summary if the house opens a little every day.
Osteria Enoteca da Sasino: common questions
Can you book Osteria Enoteca da Sasino from abroad?
Yes. Dinner only, twenty seats, book up to three months ahead — online via Pocket Concierge or by phone in Japanese. Cancellation is strict. You can book online yourself, or our Tokyo desk can request the table for you; our ¥6,000-per-seat fee is charged only if we confirm your table.
Some of these links are referral links: if you book through them we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. Restaurants never pay us to be listed or ranked. Editorial policy
Cite this page
Facts on this page were checked by our Tokyo desk. You are welcome to quote them with a link:
Osteria Enoteca da Sasino — Hirosaki, Aomori — SHOKU NOREN (checked September 2026). https://shokunoren.com/restaurants/da-sasino-hirosaki
