Authentic Italian with a splash of soy sauce

At the new Venetian restaurant All’onda, opened by two alums of the Michael White empire earlier this month, the menu features many of the items you’d expect at a high-end, modern Italian joint — tortellini in brodo, tuna crudo, house-made gelato. But take a closer look and you’ll find that the tortellini broth is actually a Japanese stock known as dashi. The tuna is topped with wasabi. And one of the gelato flavors on offer? Soy sauce.

Mamma mia!

All’onda is just the latest in a wave of trendy new Mediterranean joints adding unexpected Asian flair to their dishes.

All’onda chef Chris Jaeckle, who previously worked at Japanese powerhouse Morimoto and later at White’s Ai Fiori, says the unexpected combination of cuisines came to him organically. Cooking Italian at Ai Fiori, he recalls, “I kept thinking, ‘This could really use some soy sauce.’ ”

Jaeckle says he was also inspired by Japan’s love of Italian food — Eataly opened in Tokyo before New York City — and Japanese-owned Italian spots that have been around for years, like Basta Pasta, an offshoot of a Tokyo restaurant with a West 17th Street outpost, where you can order spaghetti topped with tobiko (flying fish roe) and shiso (Japanese mint).

Meanwhile, over at Piora, a critically acclaimed Greenwich Village restaurant that opened last summer, the Asian accents are typically Korean. The restaurant’s standout pasta dish is a black garlic bucatini topped with Dungeness crab, maitake mushrooms and chilies.

The noodles are a classic pasta shape, made using an extruder from Italy, but they taste and appear more like Asian fare. The dough is flavored with a puree of black garlic.

The dish is “Italian in base, but then it’s got this Korean background to it,” chef Chris Cipollone says.

The pasta also has a springy texture more akin to ramen noodles than traditional Italian bucatini, thanks to the addition of baking soda in the dough.

It’s not just pasta plates that are getting an infusion of Eastern promise. Last fall, Bergen Hill opened in Cobble Hill, serving Mediterranean crudo in a sushi-bar format.

“Some of [my dishes] are strictly Italian, some are strictly Japanese,” says chef Andrew D’Ambrosi, a veteran of Le Cirque and Asia de Cuba. A recent dessert of panna cotta with yuzu riffed on both cuisines.

“No one likes the word fusion anymore,” says D’Ambrosi, “but everyone does it.”