My wife and I visited Tokyo in October of 2018, and she let me shepherd her around to several of my favorite places. I’d been to the New York Bar only once before, celebrating a customer win with my work colleagues. It was enjoyable enough that first time; the second time… well, led to this.
Note that the original version was posted (with thanks) to TripAdvisor; go read it there if you’d like, they’re nice.
The New York Bar and Grill in the West Shinjuku neighborhood of Tokyo is an overcooked experience of New York City stereotypes. It presides in isolated garishness on the 52nd floor of the Park Plaza Hotel, and is this city’s — and perhaps the world’s — pinnacle of adversarial chophouse. Everything you might miss about the worst of New York City and have grown accustomed to in the best of Tokyo will quickly be remedied here.
As you enter, you’ll join a crowd of westerners queued ahead of you in a 30-minute rope line — as obligatory as it is unnecessary — one you can’t quite recall seeing in that one movie that was filmed here that one time. Once inside, the view of the cityscape is stunning, and as the night progresses it will become increasingly alluring as you begin to long for the earnest friendliness of every other Japanese eatery you have ever patronized. In between moments of brief shouting necessary to maintain the skeleton of conversation at your table, you’ll have more than ample time to reflect that the music is exactly what you’d expect of a unlikable lounge-lizard jazz band, one that performs with what-can-only-be an intentional disregard of musicality, excessively delivered.
But you’re not there for the view and definitely not the soundtrack: you’re there to see and been seen with other Westerners suffering the shared experience of what a malicious, unimaginative committee of tier-2 corporate hospitality professionals would consider artisanal New York City mistreatment. You will alternately feel both lucky to have landed a table there, and sense that the wait staff is terrifically annoyed over your continued presence. It feels exactly like Soho’s Balthazar’s, if it were moved to the upper east side, if Giuliani were the maître d’, if the Ramones were rehearsing, and if the wait staff were trained in congeniality by the New York Rangers.
In the table section of the restaurant, you will discover in the menu’s microscopic font a minimum purchase requirement of the half-hearted American-themed cuisine: you cannot enjoy merely an appetizer and cocktail, you must also enjoy at least one mandatory entrée for several thousand additional yen. Should you have reason to question this usurious policy, the night manager T___ is there to brusquely dismiss your concerns. He is a formal, efficient, readily-confrontational chap, far more suited for issuing yellow cards in a division-2 German soccer league match than being within goal-kick distance of the restaurant service industry. You will not like him, he will not like you, but he will smile as you depart, in the same way an evil anesthesiologist might smile as the last of your consciousness reluctantly fades.
Twenty-thousand yen and two elevator rides later, as you depart the garrison-themed hotel premises, perhaps you will, like I did, detect a note of sympathetic regret in the eyes of your taxi driver as he whisks you off to the alive and breathing Shinjuku station. It's an expression that's difficult to translate, but it runs along the lines of: “of all the bars and all the gin joints in this whole damn town, you could have done so much better.”
