Hi — I’m Tabiiku. I travel around Japan with my daughter on the principle that experience is the best thing you can give a child. We live in Tokyo, so booking a hotel in our own city is not something I would normally consider. The Tokyo Station Hotel was good enough that I want to make an exception and write it up.
This is a classic hotel in the truest sense. The attention to detail, the professionalism of the service and the food were among the best I have come across anywhere in Japan. If you have stayed at Shima Kanko Hotel out in Mie, this is the closest comparison I can give you.
There is almost nothing in the way of on-site activities, but the hotel is effectively part of Tokyo Station itself, and there are always taxis waiting outside, so getting anywhere in the city is trivial. For overseas visitors that combination is hard to beat: you can be on a Shinkansen to Kyoto ten minutes after leaving your room.
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The room and the service
The moment I usually realise a hotel is going to disappoint me is when I see the check-in queue. It happens every day, every week — and yet somehow it is never anticipated, or it is anticipated and nothing is done about it. That, to me, is the tell.
The Tokyo Station Hotel is exactly what a first-class hotel should be: we did not wait a single minute. Without being asked, the front desk offered to check whether a late check-out was available the next day. It turned out the hotel was fully booked and the room needed to be ready for a 3pm arrival, so noon was the best they could do — which was completely fine, and I was grateful they had thought of it at all. On the walk up to the room, the same member of staff kept up a stream of small facts about the building’s history. The room itself has remarkably high ceilings and feels wonderfully open, and the window looks straight out over the front of Tokyo Station.
It happened to be my birthday, and my family had arranged a cake to be sent to the room. Not only did a member of staff offer to take a photo of us — the next day they handed us a print of it, together with a handwritten note. That one really got me.
Dinner: Enoteca Norio
We had dinner at Enoteca Norio, the Italian restaurant inside the hotel, and took the full tasting menu. The cooking was excellent, but once again it was the service that stayed with me. It is a long menu, and partway through my daughter had had enough of sitting still. I asked whether they could speed things up, and the remaining courses arrived at an astonishing pace — and the petits fours that come with the coffee were wrapped up for us to take away.
It is billed as Italian, but there is only one small pasta course; the rest is a refined antipasto, a main and a dessert, sitting somewhere between Italian and French. I would go back.
Breakfast
The breakfast buffet here has a reputation as one of the best in Japan. The food lives up to it, and so, again, does the hospitality. Japanese, Western and Chinese dishes, desserts and bread — everything is covered. My own favourite was the sandwiches: the bread itself was so soft and lightly sweet that I still think about it.
We were seated in a side room where the staff could not easily see us, and yet at the precise moment I was about to ask for something, someone would appear and offer it. There is a live egg station too. You can order from your table by QR code, but I ordered on impulse while standing in front of it, was handed a numbered ticket, and went back to eat with the intention of collecting the omelette later. A member of staff appeared, said they would check the number, and brought it over to me. Genuinely faultless.
What you feel throughout is that the goal has been set around the guest’s experience rather than around keeping the hotel’s own operation running smoothly. My reviews almost always end up as “this bit was good, but this bit…”. This time I cannot come up with a single thing.
Living in Tokyo, I doubt I will find an excuse to stay again soon. But if we ever move out of the city and come back to visit, this is where I would want to stay. If you are coming to Japan from abroad and want one night in a hotel that shows you what Japanese hospitality actually means, put it on the list.
Book The Tokyo Station Hotel
Check rates and availability on Agoda
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