Tokyo’s most famous pizzeria opens in Sydney with 1000 reservations already booked

Tsubasa Tamaki tried 700 different flour blends over 18 years before he was happy with his pizza dough. The Tokyo-based chef’s dedication has made him globally famous and Sydney diners will get a taste of his slices when the first Australian branch of Pizza Studio Tamaki opens Saturday May 16 in the CBD.

Step into the 78-seat pizzeria and you might see balls of 30-hour-fermented dough being prepped for service. You may also glimpse mineral-rich salt sourced from Japan’s Okinawa prefecture, Tamaki’s birthplace. The chef is known for throwing these crystals into the wood-fired oven and placing his dough on top. “That way, the salt sticks to the underside whilst it’s baking,” he says.

Meanwhile, whole cherry tomatoes on his signature “Tamaki” pizza generate maximum flavour impact. Diners are meant to fork-smash the tomatoes so they splash oven-intensified flavours over the pizza’s other toppings of smoked mozzarella and pecorino cheese. “It just tastes better when you crush it,” Tamaki says.

His namesake pizza began as an attempt to break down barriers with customers. “If they remember the name, we can become friends, you know?” he says.

But his name now resonates with an audience much larger than the local following he amassed at the first Pizza Studio Tamaki he opened in 2017 in Tokyo. He’s since received recognition from the Michelin Guide and global top pizza lists, and was named “one of the most talked-about pizzaioli in the world” by The New York Times. A New York branch of Studio Tamaki launched in early May, too, and it was immediately booked out for a month.

There has been a similar response in Sydney, with more than 1000 reservations for Studio Tamaki already, and Saturday’s services are fully booked. (Walk-in customers can still try their luck at the door, however.) The George Street site near Wynyard Station is Tamaki’s biggest global outpost to date.

Sydneysiders will have to wait until summer to try the “Tomato Shaved Ice Pizza”, but otherwise the Pizza Studio Tamaki menu here will reflect the dough-stretched offerings available globally.

His magnificently light bases – topped with pork sausage and egg for the “Bismarck” pizza and five cheeses sweetened with honey for his “Cinque Formaggi” – are blistered and charred along the ridge of the crust, a hallmark of the Tokyo pizza style. There is also talk of developing Australian specials with seasonal seafood: Tamaki was especially impressed with what was available at the Sydney Fish Market during a previous visit.

Kaizen Food Group is the company responsible for running the restaurant in Australia (it brought Japan’s queue-attracting Mensho Tokyo to Sydney in 2024) and shipping Tamaki’s signature flour blend and Okinawan salt from Japan. The chef is in Sydney for the opening week, but two assistants from Pizza Studio Tamaki in Japan – Okashiro Takuma and Tomoki Suzuki – will stay on to work at the restaurant, with local head chef Steven Setiawan overseeing the kitchen day-to-day.

Good Food can also reveal there are plans for more Studio Tamaki locations in Melbourne and other Australian cities. According to a Kaizen Food Group spokesperson, “This is just the first one.”

Dinner daily

259 George Street, Sydney, instagram.com/pst.australia