Where Italy Meets Japan, and Lunch Comes at a Discount

Edwin Goei
15 hours ago
5 min read

REVIEW: Japanese-Italian fusion gets another spin in Fountain Valley at Momonoki, where a miso carbonara shines and a $28 lunch deal draws crowds.

Clockwise from upper left: miso bacon carbonara, cream corn cavatelli and pappadelle bolognese. Photo by Edwin Goei, Culture OC

It’s Sunday morning in Fountain Valley and I’m standing in a strip mall anchored by a Grocery Outlet, waiting for Momonoki – Orange County’s newest Japanese-Italian restaurant – to open. And as the line behind me grows, I start to wonder: Why are there so many people here? Has “itameshi,” that niche Japanese take on Italian cuisine where pastas meet ingredients like uni and shiso, finally hit the mainstream? Were these people, like me, disciples of the genre and devotees of itameshi specialists like Pasta e Pasta in Little Tokyo and Cafe Hiro in Cypress, where I’ve been a regular for more than 20 years?

The last time I saw this much excitement for a Japanese-Italian spot was when Ini Ristorante debuted across town, the latest eatery from Chef Viet Nguyen’s Kei Concepts empire. But that felt more like a win for his well-oiled marketing machine, which also created hour-long queues when its Kei Coffee House opened this past summer. It didn’t seem as if diners were clamoring for another Japanese-Italian restaurant so much as another buzzy Kei Concepts production.

Diners lineup outside of Momonoki's storefront. Photo by Edwin Goei, Culture OC

Ini barely qualified as an “itameshi” place anyway. It took the idea only as a baseline. There was zero overlap between Ini’s menu and others in the space. Instead it married all sorts of Asian flavors to Italian, not just Japanese. There was numbing mala pepper in the lamb pizza, a flavor profile that’s unmistakably Chinese. While it is indeed a tasty slice, among my fellow Cafe Hiro loyalists, the joke was that “INI” stood for “It’s Not Itameshi.”

But that’s a bit unfair. Itameshi – the Japanese term for this blending of Italian with indigenous flavors – has always been about adaptation. The style gained traction in Japan after the second world war with the U.S. occupation. Working with only what was available at the time, it is believed that a chef in Yokohama took inspiration from the “red-sauce” Italian dishes eaten by American soldiers and created a dish called spaghetti napolitan. With ketchup as the main ingredient, the pasta bore little resemblance to anything from Naples, but it launched a new and distinctly Japanese interpretation of Italian cuisine.

Even so, itameshi has remained on the fringes in Southern California, a blip in a sea of sushi and ramen. So what was drawing this crowd to Momonoki when everyone else was nibbling avocado toast at Sunday brunch? Perhaps it was goodwill from Momoyama, the hidden but very highly regarded sushi bar three doors down under which it shares the same ownership. Momoyama’s former executive chef, Taiki Kuramoto, is a minor local celebrity, having once won Hulu’s “Best in Dough” with his sashimi pizza and later competed on “Chopped.” But it couldn’t be that: Kuramoto left over a year ago to open his own sushi omakase restaurant in Tustin.

The answer, as it turned out, was simpler. Momonoki was offering a $28 three-course lunch special, available even on weekends. The deal – in which you can save up to 28% off à la carte pricing – was advertised only on its socials. So if you came in unaware, the servers won’t volunteer it until they’re asked. But everyone in line, it seemed, was already in the know. And now I was too.

Momonoki's dining room with a ceiling of dangling ivy. Photo by Edwin Goei, Culture OC

As soon as my party and I were seated in the ivy-canopied dining room, we requested the special menu. On seeing the six appetizer choices, four entrees and three desserts, our initial plan was to divide and conquer so we could try a variety of dishes. But math and common sense ultimately prevailed: We ordered the most expensive items to maximize the discount, even if that meant repeating a few plates.

The amberjack crudo was a no-brainer. At $16 à la carte, it was more than twice the cost of the $7 bowl of clam chowder. And beneath its alternating layers of silken hamachi, crunchy nectarine and creamy avocado, there was the most essential part of the dish: a puddle of ponzu. It jolted the not-particularly-flavorful slices of raw fish back to life with its citrus acidity as though an electric current.

The next most expensive appetizer joined charred asparagus spears, fried egg and parmesan: a trio that deserves to be as ubiquitous as bagels, lox and cream cheese. I last encountered the combination at the late, great Three Seventy Common in Laguna Beach, where it was revelatory. Momonoki’s version wasn’t quite there. The woody ends of the asparagus went untrimmed and the heavy carbonara sauce overpowered what should’ve been a delicate balance of richness and freshness.

PHOTO 1: Amberjack crudo. PHOTO 2: Grilled asparagus carbonara. Photos by Edwin Goei, Culture OC

That same sauce lubricated the pasta in the entrée called “Miso Bacon Carbonara.” But instead of the tagliatelle that was advertised, what arrived resembled udon – thick, round and bouncy. Dotted with chewy bacon, crowned with a raw egg yolk and a snowfall of parmesan, the dish looked oppressively rich. Yet something – perhaps the umami of miso or the heat of red pepper flakes – kept it in check. It also happened to be one of the few entrées that nodded to Japan and I loved it.

The rest of the mains leaned traditional Italian – with a cacio e pepe, a pomodoro and a bolognese among them. But anyone familiar with Marcella Hazan’s sacrosanct recipe for bolognese would spot the deviations in Momonoki’s rendition: Hazan, the Julia Child of Italian cooking, used white wine, not red; she simmered the sauce for hours until the meat turned silky, not coarse like Hamburger Helper; and, above all, she would have thrown out the whole pot if it ever ended up this inedibly salty.

So is Momonoki an itameshi restaurant or just Italian with an occasional wink to the Japanese? Maybe it’s beside the point. The menu certainly doesn’t care about borders. Chimichurri, for example, turned up not just on the skirt steak (which isn’t included in the $28 deal and, at $25, happens to be the most popular and third priciest item on the menu) but also in the cream corn cavatelli, where the bright and herby Argentine blend rescued the dish from tasting like it came out of a Campbell’s can.

PHOTO 1: Miso bacon carbonara. PHOTO 2: Pappadelle bolognese. PHOTO 3: Matcha honey ice cream. Photos by Edwin Goei, Culture OC

By dessert, any further attempt to categorize Momonoki felt futile. The lineup included miso brown butter and matcha honey ice creams but also a cà phê sữa đá flavor featuring Vietnamese coffee and egg yolk custard – an offering that, given the restaurant’s proximity to Little Saigon, might be the truest expression of itameshi’s spirit of adaptation.

Before we left, our server assured us the lunch special wasn’t ending anytime soon. And right now, in these inflationary times, perhaps that’s the most important takeaway here: a good bargain will always draw a crowd.