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Mercury May Be in Retrograde, But I’m in Tokyo
Seven days, several tasting menus and a questionable amount of negronis in a city that makes my existential dread feel glamorous.
Words by Nicole Kavander
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52 floors up in the Tokyo night, I decided that perhaps everything was going to be alright. Below, millions of city lights glittered through the panorama windows of New York Bar.
I had a negroni in front of me, the band had just started playing and, for a moment, I was living so fully inside Lost in Translation that I half expected Bill Murray to materialise beside the piano.
Mercury was in retrograde. But I was in Tokyo. And Tokyo knows how to distract you from whatever you’re going through in your life. Because here, that life seems more distant than the single light from a car below.
This is not the definitive guide to Tokyo. But it is mine. Consider it a survival guide for people like you and me. People whose coping mechanisms involve elaborate drinks and very, very good food.
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Start with a negroni: New York Bar
There is probably no place in Tokyo more burdened by cinematic expectation than New York Bar. Lost in Translation made it famous, and more than two decades later people still arrive hoping for a little of that melancholy magic. Annoyingly, it works.
Tokyo stretches endlessly beneath you, the jazz is live and everyone looks slightly more interesting than they probably did downstairs. There is real comfort in a place that already knows exactly what it is. Order something cold and strong, sit close enough to hear the band properly and let yourself fall for the cliché.
When precision becomes theatre: est
If New York Bar is Tokyo as cinema, est at Four Seasons Otemachi is Tokyo as choreography. Chef Guillaume Bracaval takes classical French technique and turns his attention almost entirely to Japanese produce, with tasting menus built around ingredients sourced across the country.
The precision extends far beyond the plate: sauces arrive at exactly the right moment, courses appear almost silently and ingredients are arranged so perfectly you briefly feel guilty about disturbing them. For a few hours, someone else has thought about the temperature, the wine, the timing and what comes next. Your only job is to eat. There are worse forms of luxury.
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Paris, apparently, is in Marunouchi: Maison Marunouchi
Maison Marunouchi is the antidote to tasting-menu fatigue. The food leans unapologetically into bistro territory: steak frites, roast chicken, handmade pasta, freshly baked madeleines. Nothing needs a diagram to explain how to eat it.
Beyond the windows, trains slide in and out of Tokyo Station while you sit still with bread and a glass of wine. Travel can make you greedy for superlatives: the best, the newest, the impossible reservation. Maison is a useful reminder that not every dinner needs to change your life. Sometimes dinner can just be really good. Mercury can do whatever it likes.
Tokyo does Italian very well: Arva
At Arva, Italian cooking meets the Japanese autumn: pumpkin worked into gnocchi, local pork paired with radicchio, figs and vincotto, all served beneath Aman Tokyo’s enormous ceilings with the city laid out below.
After several days of moving through Tokyo with a list of things to see, eat and photograph, a long Italian lunch felt almost rebellious. When even pleasure starts to feel scheduled, pasta, wine and nowhere urgent to be is a useful correction.
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"So eat the tasting menu. Order the negroni. Listen to the jazz band. Spend too long over lunch. There will always be another deadline, another flight, another mildly ominous astrological event."
The new Tokyo: NiNi
NiNi, inside the new 1 Hotel Tokyo, takes the sunny flavours of the Mediterranean and runs them through Tokyo: Provençal olive oil, citrus and herbs alongside umeboshi, shiso, Japanese beef and produce from local growers. The result is less formal than many of the city’s luxury dining rooms and much more interested in sharing, lingering and ordering another plate.
After several highly orchestrated meals, that energy was refreshing. People talk. Plates move around the table. Nobody seems afraid of making noise. Not every luxury restaurant needs to make you lower your voice the second you sit down.
For a drink with history: Old Imperial Bar
The Old Imperial Bar requires very little culinary analysis, which is rather the point. Dark wood, low lighting and fragments of Frank Lloyd Wright’s original Imperial Hotel do most of the work; your responsibility is simply to order something classic and not interfere.
Tokyo has no shortage of bars reinventing what can go into a glass. This one has no interest in doing so. Put your phone away and pretend it is 1923. At least until someone messages you on WhatsApp.
The big night out: Girandole by Alain Ducasse
Girandole at the newly reopened Park Hyatt is a French brasserie rather than a temple of tiny tasting-menu portions: foie gras with toasted brioche, smoked salmon with horseradish cream, lobster cooked with courgettes and, to finish, rum savarin with vanilla Chantilly.
It could easily feel overly serious. Alain Ducasse, Park Hyatt, Shinjuku: there are a lot of names doing heavy lifting before you even sit down. Instead, dinner feels like dinner should occasionally feel: an event. Get dressed, order Champagne, have dessert and then go upstairs for jazz. Obviously.
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When dinner becomes memory: HOSHINOYA Tokyo
My final Tokyo dinner looked in the opposite direction. HOSHINOYA’s ten-course “Lost Flavors of Japanese Home Recipes” takes regional dishes that are slowly disappearing from Japanese homes and pulls them into the present. This autumn that means everything from Wakayama wasabi sushi and Ishikawa fisherman’s cooking to a chestnut dessert inspired by traditional kuri surinagashi.
Luxury travel is obsessed with novelty: the newest hotel, the latest chef, the reservation everyone suddenly needs. I am as guilty of this as anyone. But some of the most interesting meals ask the opposite question: what are we about to lose? After a week spent chasing Tokyo’s newest and shiniest tables, one of the meals I kept thinking about was the one looking backwards.
So, did Tokyo fix everything?
Absolutely not. My inbox still existed, the world remained mildly chaotic, my bank account had questions and whatever Mercury was doing, I doubt it had consulted me first.
But Tokyo reminded me that we spend an absurd amount of time waiting for the perfect moment to enjoy ourselves: when work calms down, when the trip is less hectic, when the planets behave. None of those conditions ever arrive at the same time.
So eat the tasting menu. Order the negroni. Listen to the jazz band. Spend too long over lunch. There will always be another deadline, another flight, another mildly ominous astrological event.
But for seven days, I was in Tokyo, and I ate very, very well.