The Society

The Society at the Park Hotel Tokyo is a wonderful bar influenced by Takayuki Suzuki and the Tokyo home if the Scotch Malt Whisky Society.
After you reach the 25^th floor lobby and walk in you’re presented with this setting — two top tables by the window with a nighttime view between office buildings of the Sumidagawa marked by ship lights and the contrasting absolute darkness of Hamarikyu; 12 seats along two sides of a warm back lit bar counter of caramel variegate Italian marble; bartenders in white shirts and black suits.
Settling in for a go at the SMWS inventory? Look at the selections and descriptions in the book. Follow it up with the information on the label.
Here’s two examples:
SMWS 10.81 Sea-​salt caramel ice cream:
Bunnahabhain (Ireland), distilled Dec 20, 2005, 9yrs, 222 bottles, 60.4% abv, ex-​bourbon refill cask.
Fresh maritime aroma of smoked salmon, mussels, and oysters. The taste neat was a juicy gammon steak with a lime ginger salsa.
SMWS 132.6 Nite Nurse nipped by piranhas:
Karuizawa (Japan), distilled Dec 31, 2000, 12yrs, 553 bottles, 63% abv, ex-​sherry refill butt.
The complex nose combines salted caramel, barley sugars and ginger snaps with laurel hedges, lacquered wood, hazelnuts, cherries and cigarette packets (more herbal with water). The palate mingles dark chocolate and fig rolls with orange peel, perfume and warm nipping spices.
How do you make the ultimate Bloody Mary? Take house Absolute Vodka and Del Monte canned tomato juice, put them in a Boston shaker with ice and hard shake until the temperature in your palms and the sound of the ice moving back and forth in unison tell you the drink is ready, then pour into a stemmed wine glass with no garnish. And wait. Give the pink strawberry piña colada concoction a minute. A wonderful salted tomato head forms on a Bloody Mary that you will not get anywhere else.
Two of Takayuki Suzuki’s highball creations:
Forest Highball: Hakushu 12 yr, soda water, matcha powder, twisted green bamboo leaf garnish
A current seasonal special. Japanese Red Pine Highball: Yamazaki, white mint liqueur rinse, fresh mint, soda water, red line and green bamboo leaf garnish.
To finish, from Takayuki Suzuki’s «The Perfect Martini», a scarlet cocktail of Crème de Cassis, Framboise, lime, «…amalgamating the flavors with a hard shake to impart the flavor burst of a bite into freshly picked fruit.» The Rosebud.
May you walk out of this place with your own Rosebud, a memory you will keep your whole life.

This is a very cool setting and the cocktails are superb. The lower rating is for the pricey cover charge and we felt forgotten after our cocktail was served. If food was available, it wasn’t offered to us. I expect more for the price.

HIGH Society.
After a long day of sight seeing, shopping, eating, and drinking, it’s a comfort to know one can have a nightcap at their hotel. Located on the lobby level of the Park Hotel Tokyo, the Society can be found just off to the left of the elevator banks.
This bar is not by any means spacious, but its quite cozy if you know what I mean. The main/​bar in the center has a generous amount of seating, while there are bar height tables set against the windows to enjoy the view. We visited twice during our stay and opted for the tables near the window both times. My friend opted for different types of Japanese whiskey as they have a decent selection on hand. I opted for my only «American» type beverage on the trip, a Cosmopolitan. As a forewarning, the pours for both our drinks are not as a generous as we expected, as my friend joked that he wondered where the rest of my drink was since the martini glass was so small.
In any case, we enjoyed our drinks in a friendly environment after some long days on the town. Lastly, it was quite interesting to observe the diverse crowd of travelers/​patrons visiting, as some looked like they were guests of the hotel, but others looked like they needed a drink before heading home from work in the nearby office buildings.
BOTTOM LINE: A cozy bar located within the Park Hotel Tokyo.

Hidden off to the side of Tateru Yoshino bis is a fabulous bar. Maybe not as famous as some of Toyko’s other hotel bars but Id put Takayuki Suzuki’s cocktails against anyone’s in the city. It’s also the site of the first Japanese Malt Whiskey Society so if you like your spirits pure you could go that route too. However we came for the cocktails and the great 25^th floor view. I called for Dealer’s choice so the bartender made me a Hibiki 17 and then a Calvados cocktail. Both were excellent. Watching the precision and exacting manner of the bartenders is a site. There were both sets of local and foreign business men frequenting the bar as well as a couple from Australia. However the most entertaining person we encountered was a guy from Mexico CIty that spoke, Japanese, Mandarin, Italian, French, Spanish and English. You never know what the world reveals to you when you share drinks with folks and Bar A Vins is a great place to do it