RESTAURANT NEWS | MIAMI
Tokyo Pizza Master ‘Chef Bun’ Is Coming to Miami Beach
Royale will turn 30-hour dough, Japanese precision, and an 800-degree oven into South Florida’s first taste of Tokyo-style Neapolitan pizza.
By Eric Barton
6:46 a.m. ET, Sept. 25, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.
Miami doesn’t need another pizza place. Jess Varughese knows this. What it does need, he argues, is pizza made with the fanatical precision that turned Tokyo into one of the world’s most interesting places to eat a Neapolitan pie.
That’s the idea behind Royale Pizza Napoletana, expected to open this fall on Miami Beach. The 65-seat restaurant will introduce South Florida to Tokyo-style Neapolitan pizza and bring Bungo “Chef Bun” Kaneko, the influential pizzaiolo behind Tokyo’s Savoy.
Varughese, the banking entrepreneur and restaurateur who created Miami’s secretive, members-only Haiku, began considering the restaurant after one of Haiku’s members told him about Savoy. He traveled to Japan with Haiku chef Albert Diaz, formerly of Zuma in London and Miami, and quickly understood the fuss.
“It was one of those bites where you immediately know you’re experiencing something different,” Varughese says. “The pizza looked incredibly simple, but there was so much precision behind it—the texture of the crust, the balance, the restraint. Nothing was there that didn’t need to be.”
Tokyo-style Neapolitan pizza emerged from Japanese pizzaiolos applying their country’s familiar fixation on technique and ingredients to the loose, blistered pies of Naples. The results have inspired restaurants from Los Angeles to New York and Nashville. At its best, the style produces a crust that is airy but substantial, charred but not scorched, and somehow crisp and chewy at once.
Dalila Sabatino with Bungo Kaneko
“I remember thinking, ‘Why don’t we have anything like this in Miami?’” Varughese says. “Not that Miami needed another pizza restaurant—it needed this kind of pizza.”
Landing Kaneko required something more persuasive than a licensing deal and a plane ticket. Varughese says the Royale team spent considerable time with him in Tokyo, discussing not only what the Miami restaurant should be but also what it should avoid becoming.
“We weren’t interested in copying Savoy or simply putting a famous Tokyo pizza in Miami,” Varughese says. “The idea was to take the discipline, technique and philosophy behind what Chef Bun does and build something new around it.”
Kaneko will be joined by Diaz and pizzaiola Dalila Sabatino, who has worked with Bun as well as William Joo of Los Angeles’ Pizzeria Sei. Oscar Coll will oversee operations, while Haiku hospitality veteran Audrey Armada will lead the customer experience.
Gem Caesar
Royale will bear little resemblance to Haiku, where a single party receives a tightly choreographed dinner each night. This will be a walk-in restaurant with counter ordering, music, takeout, delivery, and pizzas moving steadily through an 800-degree oven. The opening menu is expected to include four traditional pizzas, three specials, antipasti, two pastas, and two main courses. “In some ways they couldn’t be more different,” Varughese says of the two restaurants. “But philosophically, they’re actually very similar.”
Marinara
Pizzaiola Dalila Sabatino
The bridge between them is obsession. Royale’s dough undergoes more than 30 hours of fermentation. The team has tested blends of artisan flour, adjusted for variations in particle size using an autolyse technique, and altered Miami’s water to approximate the softness of the water in Japan. It is an imposing amount of science in service of food meant to be picked up and eaten with little ceremony. “We’ve put an almost unreasonable amount of work into making something that ultimately should feel very simple,” Varughese says.
The restaurant’s design follows that mandate. Royale will have a fast-casual setup, including a large communal table, with no reservations or velvet-rope theatrics. Seats will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis.
For Varughese, all the flour experiments, fermentation tests, and trans-Pacific recruiting come down to a considerably less complicated measure of success.
Margherita
“First, I hope they think the pizza is fucking great,” he says. “But beyond that, I want Royale to be a place people genuinely want to come back to. Great music, great energy, an amazing pizza, a glass of wine—and none of the friction or formality that can sometimes come with a serious restaurant.”
Spaghetti pomodoro
Chris Wilcox turns whole animals into fresh cuts, charcuterie, and serious sandwiches.
By MARIA RODRIGUEZ
