Eat Here Now is a first look at some of the newest, hottest restaurants around — the ones we think are worth visiting. We dine once, serve forth our thoughts, and let you take it from there.

A meal at Ciaorigato feels like eating inside the Sistine Chapel — if Michelangelo’s frescoed ceiling were a little less biblical and sprayed with graffiti.

Serving inventive yet easy-to-grasp mashups like okonomiyaki pizza and bucatini with tsukune (chicken meatballs) and Japanese curry to diners seated on dark leather couches near scalloped metal screens, Ciaorigato may be the most glamorous restaurant to have opened in recent memory along the porous boundary of the Tenderloin and Union Square. As for the scantily clad ingénues painted overhead, well, they’re no angels.

Owner Dario Nicotra contends this is the only Italian-Japanese fusion restaurant in the country. (The name Ciaorigato, a made-up term, yokes the Italian word for “hello” and “goodbye” with the Japanese word for “thank you.”) But mashing up pizza and pasta with other culinary traditions is not as out-there as you might think. Nicotra, who, like chef Marco Avila, is a native of Tuscany, says Italian kitchens already have fusion in their DNA, from the geographic divide between butter and olive oil to the hyperregional focus on various pastas. “It’s simply cool and sexy,” Nicotra says. 

It also risks coming across as contrived. The menu’s overreliance on wordplay — see, “pizza do,” a pun on “dough” and the Japanese word for “the way” — doesn’t help. But Ciaorigato’s conceit works. Broadly speaking, the cuisines of Japan and Italy share many similarities, including presentations of raw fish (sushi and crudo) and skewered meats (yakitori and spiedini), to say nothing of the mutual emphasis on ancestral craft.

There’s a lot to fall in love with here, including that $22 okonomiyaki pizza. A blistered, quattro-formaggio pie with wild mushrooms, it’s gilded with salty-sweet okonomi sauce, kewpie mayo, and seaweed flakes for a maximum umami bite. The even better $22 nero di Tokyo pizza sees squid ink blended into tomato sauce and topped with mozzarella, octopus, shiso, and tamari, a gluten-free condiment similar to soy sauce.

The $22 bucatini with tsukune — spaghetti and meatballs’ distant cousin — takes nicely to the not-too-sweet Japanese curry, and the chicken tsukune have a springy texture not unlike fish balls. The tsukune also come yakitori-style with an acidic side salad and an array of spicy dips ($12). Even the $6 bread is fun. It’s cloyingly called “focacciapan,” but it’s a small loaf of rosemary milk bread partnered with honey-truffle butter.

Portions are small, and prices are agreeable. As such, this dinner-only menu is meant to be explored, and it’s impossible not to order at least one sushi roll or plate of crudo. The $18 crudo al mirtillo, a bowl of hamachi with huckleberry, thin daikon slices cut into stars, shiso tempura, and plenty of edible flowers in an umeboshi broth, is delicately flavored and as brightly colored as a bowl of Trix.

Avila was hesitant to jump headlong into the world of sushi, aware that apprenticeships require three years of experience with rice before any would-be masters are even allowed near the fish. So he brought in two trained sushi chefs and encouraged them to play with Italian ingredients, resulting in hybrids like a vitello tonnato, a Piedmontese dish of veal in a mayo-and-tuna sauce. “It came out phenomenal,” Avila says.

Ciaorigato occupies the space that belonged to Robin Song’s Gibson, which closed in 2022. Sharp-eyed fans of that live-fire Art Deco restaurant may recognize that its successor inherited more than a few elements of the décor. Plenty of kitchen toys came along with the space, like the barbecue and the pizza oven. Downstairs, Avila was thrilled to find a huge space with four walk-ins ideal for dry-aging meat. “I’m planning to start doing our own prosciutto,” he says.

Ciaorigato also shares a number of traits with Modí, the Mexican-Italian restaurant that Nicotra and Avila opened eight months ago on the ground floor of the Transbay Terminal. They’re both fusion projects with portmanteau names, statement pizzas, harmonious interiors, and impressive cocktail programs from Ramon Piñon. Also, they both feel like self-contained oases in parts of the city where high-end diners may not necessarily flock. But you can bet all the cries of “Ciao” are people saying hello.