The Tokyo cocktail bar that built a concept, and why it matters

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A new generation of Tokyo bars built their rooms around a governing idea rather than a drinks list. The altitude, the cacao, the sound system, the season. The concept is not the backdrop. It is the reason the room exists.

A bar menu is usually a list of drinks. At the better places it is a list of well-made drinks. At a small but growing number of Tokyo bars, it is an argument.

Not an argument in the combative sense. An argument in the older sense: a governing idea that determines every decision in the room, from what goes on the menu to how the furniture is arranged to what you find when you step off the elevator. These are concept bars. And they are doing something that most serious cocktail scenes around the world have not managed to figure out yet.

The drink is the point. The concept is why you remember it six months later.

What a concept bar actually is

A concept bar is not a themed bar. The distinction matters and it is worth being precise about.

A themed bar decorates itself in something: a film, a decade, an aesthetic. It asks you to enjoy the decoration. A concept bar builds its entire program around a governing question. What can we do with cacao that nobody has done yet? What happens to a cocktail when the room is fifty-one floors above the city? What does a bar look like when the sound system is the architecture and the drinks list exists in a supporting role?

The concept is not the backdrop. It is the reason the room exists.

Tokyo is doing this better than any city I have visited, and doing it across registers. A 51st-floor hotel bar with a live band and a panorama of the skyline. A first-floor listening room in Meguro where the speakers were not bought because the owner likes music. A cacao program in a business tower in Toranomon. A seasonal menu in Azabujuban so tightly edited it changes before you have memorised it.

Four rooms, four ideas

At 51 floors above Toranomon, Andaz Tokyo makes the concept visible before a drink has been ordered. The altitude is not a novelty. It is an argument: that a cocktail changes when a live band is playing in the same room and the city is spread out below you. The menu is imaginative and well-executed, but the concept is the room's relationship to the sky. Every decision the bar makes is in service of that relationship, and nothing about the experience lets you forget it.

Nearby in Toranomon, in the Business Tower rather than the Mori Tower where Andaz sits, memento mori follows the concept to a

completely different conclusion. The premise is cacao, taken without qualification or apology. The Cacao Pulp is the place to start. The food and dessert menu extends the logic outward. The room is asking a single question of a single ingredient and it has not run out of answers. That is the test of whether a concept holds: how many evenings it can sustain before the idea exhausts itself. This one has not.

Tokyo Confidential in Azabujuban takes seasonality and pushes it to the point where it becomes a position. The menu changes enough that what you ordered last time is probably not available this time. That is not a logistical constraint. It is a statement: a drink can be as specific to a moment as a fruit is specific to a harvest. The bar is not trying to be consistent. It is trying to be present, which is a more interesting goal.

epulor in Aobadai is the concept bar reduced to its most elemental form. The speakers are not decoration. They are the architecture the room was designed around, and everything else, the lighting, the seating arrangement, the pace at which service moves, exists in relationship to them. The cocktail list is short and competent. The concept is sound, and the drinks are there to accompany that experience rather than compete with it.

• Andaz Tokyo Toranomon Hills, By Hyatt Steep Pick
  Toranomon, Minato · Tokyo · Steep Index 8.9/10

  The rooftop bar on the 51st floor of Toranomon Hills Mori Tower where the Tokyo skyline does the heavy work and a genuinely imaginative cocktail program does not let it do all of it alone.

• memento mori
  Toranomon, Minato · Tokyo · Steep Index 8.3/10

  A cacao-dedicated cocktail bar on the third floor of Toranomon Hills Business Tower where every drink on the menu traces back to the bean in a different and convincing way.

• Tokyo Confidential Steep Pick
  Azabujuban, Minato · Tokyo · Steep Index 8.8/10

  Six floors above Azabujuban with a secret 7th-floor rooftop that most of Tokyo has not found yet. The cocktails are creative enough that the view almost becomes secondary.

• epulor
  Nakameguro · Tokyo · Steep Index 8.1/10

  A narrow Nakameguro listening bar built around the speakers rather than the bar. Trip hop and acid jazz at the right volume, low light, unhurried service — a room that rewards the decision to slow down.

Why the concept changes the visit

The practical difference between a concept bar and a very good bar without one is in how the visit works.

At a traditional cocktail bar, however skilled, you arrive and make choices from a list. The expertise is in the making of the drink. At a concept bar, the visit starts earlier, with a different kind of preparation: do you understand what this room is asking of you? Order the Cacao Pulp. Ask what the band plays tonight. Take the seasonal option rather than the reliable one. Go up to the roof if someone points upward.

The concept is a form of hospitality, which is a less obvious thing to say than it sounds. It means the bar has decided what kind of evening you could have here and built the entire room in service of that decision. The job of the guest is simply to accept the invitation.

How to visit one

The most useful preparation is to arrive knowing the concept rather than the menu. The menu follows from the concept, and once you understand the concept, the right order tends to become obvious.

At epulor, sit at the counter if you can, face the speakers, and order something from the short list without overthinking it. At memento mori, ask the staff which cacao expression is most interesting right now. At Andaz, take whatever is on the seasonal list and accept that the bar understands the room better than you do on a first visit. At Tokyo Confidential, ask what is no longer available. That tells you more about the place than what is.

The best concept bars in Tokyo are not trying to be difficult. They are trying to be specific. The effort required from the guest is small, and what it returns is the kind of evening that a list of well-made drinks, however excellent, cannot produce on its own.

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