No. 38
Lost in Translation (L.I.T.)
NEW YORK BAR AT PARK HYATT TOKYO, JAPAN
INGREDIENTS
40 ml (1¼ fl oz) Japanese sake
10 ml (⅓ fl oz) peach liqueur
10 ml (⅓ fl oz) Sakura liqueur
20 ml (⅔ fl oz) cranberry juice
10 ml (⅓ fl oz) freshly squeezed lime juice
METHOD
Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker filled with ice and shake. Strain into a Martini glass.
Park Hyatt Tokyo might forever be enmeshed with Sofia Coppola’s Academy-Award-winning 2003 film, Lost In Translation. Even if Bill Murray’s Bob and Scarlett Johansson’s Charlotte hadn’t befriended each other here, high above neon-hued Shinjuku, the hotel would still exhilarate.
Encompassing the upper portion of a three-block skyscraper – one of the city’s tallest – Park Hyatt Tokyo opened in 1994, designed by the late Kenzō Tange. Clean, calming lines abound in the guest rooms and a snow-capped Mount Fuji in the distance is companion to swims in one of the world’s most good-looking pools.
At the very top of the hotel, on the 52nd floor, is the New York Bar (yes, this is where Bob and Charlotte first broke the ice with, ‘For relaxing times, make it Suntory time’). Views of the wild, chaotic Tokyo skyline from the floor-to-ceiling windows are, of course, excellent, but they are compounded by Valerio Adami’s quartet of Pop Art paintings and Japanese sirloin steaks sizzling on the grill. Like the ‘Matured-Fashioned’ with Woodford Reserve bourbon aged in-house, fine-grained Japanese wasanbon sugar, bitters and orange peel, New York Bar exemplifies the importance of, albeit costly, simplicity.
No. 39
Mount Fuji Riff
OLD IMPERIAL BAR AT IMPERIAL HOTEL, TOKYO, JAPAN
Created by Julia Momose
INGREDIENTS
45 ml (1½ fl oz) Suntory Roku gin
15 ml (½ oz) freshly squeezed lemon juice
15 ml (½ oz) simple syrup
25 ml (¾ fl oz) fresh pineapple juice
25 ml (¾ fl oz) double (heavy) cream 1 egg white
1 Amarena cherry, to garnish
METHOD
Combine the ingredients in a cocktail shaker filled with ice and shake, then strain back into the shaker and dry shake without ice until there are no more ice shards. Pour into a chilled coupe glass and garnish with an Amarena cherry on the side of the glass.
Close to Tokyo’s Imperial Palace, Frank Lloyd Wright, that leading light of American architecture, completed the second incarnation of the Imperial Hotel in 1923 (the original debuted in 1890). Designed to capture the attention of Western tourists, the courtyard-strewn complex was built on a floating foundation in a gripping Mayan Revival-meets futurist industrial style that, despite surviving the Great Kantō Earthquake, was heartbreakingly demolished in 1968. Preservationists were keen to see the lobby and reflecting pool reassembled at the Meiji-Mura open-air architectural museum in Inuyama. Likewise, when a new Imperial Hotel sprouted on the former site in 1970, they rejoiced that the Old Imperial Bar’s design made way for terracotta and Oyō stone salvaged from the Wright era. Aside from these gorgeous remnants of the 1920s, it is a deliciously old-school establishment, suggesting a time when A-listers such as Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio hid away at the hotel. Sit at the bar, its counter glowing with a symmetrical row of warm spotlights, and let the courteous bartenders make Martinis, pour Scotch over flawless cubes of ice, and replenish your kaki-pi, the addictive rice cracker and peanut bar snack that supposedly originated here.
It’s been served at the Old Imperial Bar for decades and still the exact recipe for the Mount Fuji, named for the volcano that Frank Lloyd Wright so adored, remains a mystery. Incorporating the six ingredients that star in the Mount Fuji, Julia Momose, creative director at the Japanese-inspired Chicago bar Kumiko, made her own rendition of the drink.
SPOTLIGHT:
POLITICS, PEOPLE AND CURRENT EVENTS
a garnish of history with every order
IT HAPPENED ONE DAY
When Caravelle Saigon opened, in 1959, it was considered one of Vietnam’s tallest and most modern buildings, but this welcome dose of luxury couldn’t alleviate the grief and unpredictability that hung in the air in the wake of the still-raging Vietnam War that had started in 1955. Five years later, for instance, a bomb would explode on the Caravelle’s fifth floor. If there was a comforting element to this new hotel, it was the presence of the Saigon Saigon Rooftop Bar because here politicians, international journalists such as Peter Jennings (the Saigon bureaus of ABC, CBS and NBC set up shop at the Caravelle in the 1960s) and soldiers alike could congregate over beers and watch the war underway on the other side of the Saigon River from its balconies and terraces.
Less intense are the tales of these American hotels steeped in political and cultural history:
The Hay-Adams, Washington, DC: This hotel is a tribute to bigwigs John Hay (the former Secretary of State and personal secretary to Abraham Lincoln) and William Adams (a historian, Harvard professor and scion of the presidential Adams family). A short walk to the White House, which opened in 1928, on the site where Hay and Adams once held lively salons in
