Walk around many an Italian city and you’ll see trattorie and bakeries sharing space with a relatively new addition to the culinary territory: Sushi restaurants. After a decade of economic success, sushi restaurants now outnumber pizzerias. How did this happen?
It’s sundown in Palermo, and the twilight crowd is about to descend on the central streets around Piazza Politeama to have a bite to fuel their Saturday night. This corner of the Sicilian capital used to be frequented by office workers looking for a sweet treat in traditional patisserie such as cannoli-maker Spinnato, or seeking pillowy, doughy heaven at artisanal pizza makers Pizzeria Frida and Sciuscià.
While these local haunts remain, they’re now sharing pavement space with new staples of the neighborhood. Arashi, Gohan, and Blade Ramen are just a few of the sushi and fusion restaurants that have quietly left a permanent mark on the local food scene.
Palermo’s story is not unique: Walk around Milan, Rome, or Naples, and you’ll see the bright neon ‘all you can eat’ signage of sushi restaurants on busy piazzas, suburban streets, and mere yards away from the Colosseum or Duomo. Often replacing the more tourist-oriented trattorias, these temples of endless umami indulgence draw a very different crowd: The locals.
The numbers corroborate this shift. Across Italy, sushi and Asian restaurant openings have officially outpaced pizzerias with 17 percent new Asian and fusion openings versus 15 percent for pizzerias between 2022 and 2023—solidifying a shift that’s been decades in the making.
A Japanophile myself, I remember witnessing that shift first-hand. My hometown, Palermo, went from having one, lonely sushi restaurant in a classy central area, to having three or four just in my neighborhood. Even as Italian cooking greeted 2026 as a UNESCO-recognised Intangible Heritage of Humanity, the picture couldn’t be clearer: Sushi has become Italy’s unofficial second cuisine.
The success of a foreign cuisine in Italy was never to be taken for granted. In the early 2000s, you’d have been hard pressed to find a Thai, Indian, or Mexican restaurant outside the big cities. Even today, if you type ‘Vietnamese food in Palermo’, the search engine suggests a quick plane hop to Palermo—the neighborhood in Buenos Aires—ahead of anywhere remotely local.
“In sushi-making, the ritual aspect is essential. And I think that really resonates with Italians.”
- Francesco Pipar, consultant chef
Yet sushi, with a shared palate brought closer to home by globalization, has taken root firmly and effortlessly. “The few, simple ingredients and fresh fish appeal to the simplicity Italians are used to”, says chef Francesco Piparo, globetrotting consultant chef from Sicily.
A staunch supporter of seasonal produce from the sea, Piparo blends Japanese techniques , including nanamegiri (diagonally cut for fish styling) and sanmai oroshi (three-piece filleting) to Italian seafood preparation, with a focus on Mediterranean flavors. Since 2016, he’s introduced omakase, or ‘chef’s choice’ dining to seafood and fine dining restaurants across Palermo, Sicily, including Crudo Bar, Caveau38, and Pishi. “Italians are not big on cuisines that layer spices and textures”, he adds. “But fish and rice? We’ve built on those staples for centuries.”
Sicily is a prime example. Here, its most famous street food dish, arancine, deep-fried rice balls with a savory filling, share an essential concept and structure with Japanese onigiri—cold rice balls with a savory core and dried seaweed wrapping. Crudo di mare, an Italian version of sashimi (sliced fresh raw fish), is also a popular feature of coastal communities in Campania, and further north in Liguria. A plate of crudo usually features local catch of the day, such as tuna, red shrimp, and bream, served raw, and lightly drizzled with EVO olive oil.
“In sushi-making, the ritual aspect is essential”, he adds. “And I think that really resonates with Italians.” Whether Japanese chef or Italian nonna, both would religiously select the right fish cut at the market, and approach cooking and serving their dishes with a ceremonial reverence for their customers or loved ones. That can take the form of Japanese pre-dining rituals such as itadakimasu, or folding your hands in gratitude to the chef or, in Italy, the head of the family pouring a glass of wine and offering the first plate to a guest, before the ‘buon appetito’ signalling the start of the meal for all diners.
But it’s not just shared flavors and a love for cooking rituals that have brought these two Blue Zone countries, those which prioritize fresh, wholesome foods as the key for health and longevity, closer together.
“The current boom has been possible thanks to migration from Asia, but not from where you’d expect it,” according to Giuseppe Rizzuto, Professor of Chinese Language and Translation at the University of Palermo. So how did it happen?
For decades, sushi occupied an élite spot in European dining, served in fancy London restaurants, or enjoyed on high steel chairs in Milan’s financial district for EUR€200 per person. What made it a mainstream phenomenon is the advent of the ‘all you can eat’ (AYCE) sushi formula. Whether you ordered a sumptuous boat with tuna sashimi, spicy salmon rolls, and glistening fresh wakame seaweed, or you just enjoyed a salmon and-cream-cheese-filled California uramaki roll, the price you paid would be the same, around EUR€15 (USD$15).
According to Rizzuto, the affordable element that transformed sushi’s trajectory has little connection to Japan—but to China. Had it not been for the wave of Chinese migration to Italy in the 1990s, sushi would not have become the popular staple it is today. “While Japanese migration was a lot more uncommon in Italy, Chinese migration brought a new wave of flavors, and know-how of Asian cooking to the country,” says Rizzuto.
“I remember in the early days, going with colleagues who didn’t much care for the sushi itself. They just wanted a cheap lunch that allowed them to eat as much as they liked of fresh stuff with quirky flavors. But after a few visits, they started telling apart an uramaki from a temaki…”
- Beatrice Brattoli, food scientist and chef
But it wasn’t until the early and mid-2000s, after China joined the open market, and fish prices dropped dramatically, that momentum started to build. “As Chinese communities started their foray into hospitality, came an opportunity in the market: The rise of fascination with, and taste for, Japanese culture and food,” he says.
In this climate ideal for growth, the AYCE formula meant restaurants could keep costs low by buying cheap fish wholesale, and focus their expenditure on other costs, such as overheads and staffing. As Rizzuto puts it, the demand for cooking skills specific to Asian cuisines led to “Chinese chefs becoming kind of superstars.” Soon, the restaurants started serving more than just sushi, and came to embody a pan-Asian or fusion approach.
Sitting at my favorite all-you-can-eat restaurant, I can still see that: Salmon hosomaki [thin sushi rolls] are sitting side-by-side with chow mein, and even tom yum soup. Whereas some, like me, will religiously focus on the sushi, some diners are there just to enjoy the ride and try a bit of everything.
Sharing a cup of matcha with food scientist and chef Beatrice Brattoli at her kitchen table in Palermo, it occurs to me there is much more to sushi’s success story than a simple supply and demand dynamic. Brattoli believes the affordability of sushi restaurants effectively built up a taste for the cuisine, and pushed Italians to broaden their palate.
“I remember in the early days, going with colleagues who didn’t much care for the sushi itself. They just wanted a cheap lunch that allowed them to eat as much as they liked of fresh stuff with quirky flavors,” she tells me. “But after a few visits, they started telling apart an uramaki from a temaki, and caring about flavor combinations and even cooking styles they liked.”
Back from a trip to Japan, Brattoli noticed the ingredients needed to replicate the dishes she tried were slowly appearing in Italian supermarkets. From being unable to find even firm tofu, she could now find regional variations of it.
According to the experts, that’s exactly where the phenomenon is going. Now the market has been established, new trends are coming in—and those include regionalism, as well as a new wave from the east.
“I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of those restaurants transform into Korean next,” says Rizzuto, referencing K-Pop, South Korean blockbusters, and K-dramas sweeping Europe over the past few years.
As I walk past an empty shop with a big sign saying ‘Tteokbokki Tunnel—coming soon,’ I think about my first bite of sushi, back in 2013. Gone are the days in which indulging my sushi craving required taking three buses into town, and scanning the Chinese-only menu for a bowl of ramen. Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if my next chat with chef Piparo, professor Rizzuto, or Brattoli happened over kimchi and bibimbap or—dare to dream—even a bowl of Vietnamese pho. One day…
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Rory is a freelance travel and food journalist based in York, UK. Mostly found slurping noodles and sketching birds around the world, they love culture, cuisine, and wildlife reporting. Rory also specializes on Queer trips, informing and inspiring trans and non-binary travelers with their newsletter 'Travel Outside the Binary'. Rory’s work is featured on OutThere, The i Paper, TimeOut, Metro, and Vacationer among others.
