What a scene, 52 floors up over Shinjuku at the top of the Park Hyatt Tokyo, its gargantuan windows being lashed by gale force, wind-driven rain from the second typhoon to hit the city in three days. Seeking respite from the gods’ wrath, Thomas Jones steps out of the rain and into the New York Grill.

Text by Thomas Jones.

Despite being very used to Japanese exclamations of welcome I was well surprised and taken aback by the intense, but warming, high-pitched irashiamase from the staff outside the elevator of the New York Grill. But with such inclement weather battering the city in the form of a typhoon, it was nice to be safe and warm inside its bosom for the evening. For those not familiar with Sophia Coppola’s work, this is the place where Bill Murray relieved his boredom with ‘Suntory Time’ and a sultry jazz singer session in the movie ‘Lost in Translation’. It’s on the very top of Tokyo with desperately high ceilings, cool darkness, lots of noise and it smells of expensive cooked meat and money. It is restaurant meets jazz bar with great bouncing acoustics, lots of loud chatter, a huge open kitchen full of theatrics, and lots of very knowledgeable staff running around knowing exactly where they need to be. This is a place where people who don’t need to care about cash eat divinely expensive foods, and give a signature on a credit card slip in return so, as you can imagine, the food and service are of an above average calibre.

New York Grill’s menu is filled with meat, and this being Japan, there is the finest selection of the nation’s best cuts available. There’s beef from Yamanashi, Noda, Yamagata, and of course Kobe, along with ultra-fine seafood and Japanese pork. There is also chicken for the disinterested, and I am sure it tastes like heaven, but a chicken is a chicken and when you are staring down the barrel of a $100,000 dollar cow, it is simply fowl. And so it was that a tender Sendai rib eye and a Kobe sirloin, tasting and feeling like it was made out of butter, were placed on my table that night. There are reasons why wagyu is served in such small portions…it’s simply too rich and if eaten every day, it can be fatal! This slice of Kobe was so rich and heavy (in more ways than one at US$200 a slice) that devouring a whole Viennese gateaux would have been an easier task than this piece of juicy cow. Still, when in Rome as they say, so helping it down as I did with a Californian Pinot Noir I knew that I would pay for this the next day, but that was a long way away. from this moment so I soldiered on to the end. Virtually exhausted as I was, there was still room for more so I reached for the dessert menu.

Cakes and pastries were simply too heavy an option to consider so I requested for the ‘seasonal fruits platter’. Autumn apples, pears and persimmons were just the kind of dry and tart tastes I needed to cleanse my buttery palate. When the pineapples, mangoes and melon arrived in their place I was somewhat taken by surprise but I just figured that they were in season somewhere in the world (Bali perchance?) and let it slide on by with a laugh. After all, who was going to go out and pick apples on a rainy night like this, anyway.

New York Grill
Park Hyatt Tokyo
3-7-1-2 Nishi Shinjuku
Tokyo, Japan
Tel: +81 3 5322 1234
www.hyatt.com

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