Park Hyatt Tokyo Luxury Hotel

Detailed Review

The first and only Park Hyatt in Japan and throughout Asia, Park Hyatt Tokyo is an elegant oasis of space and calm that offers spectacular views of Tokyo, the Kanto Plain and Mount Fuji from the top 14 floors of the 52-storey Shinjuku Park Tower.

Conveniently located in the heart of Shinjuku, Tokyo's vibrant business and entertainment district, the hotel is approximately one and three quarter hours from Tokyo's Narita Airport and close to Shinjuku train station and the Tokyo subway.

Designed to feel more like a modern private residence than a hotel, Park Hyatt Tokyo's attention to detail extends to a range of specially commissioned works of art that are displayed throughout the hotel. The 177 rooms and suites are the most spacious hotel guest rooms in Tokyo, providing a serene retreat and an efficient private office with the latest amenities and high-tech communications.

With a distinguished reputation for providing the ultimate in personal attention and services, Park Hyatt Tokyo also offers a wide range of excellent restaurants, each with a unique style, providing hotel guests with a choice of cuisine from around the world.

With extensive meeting and banquet facilities, the hotel can accommodate every type of event from small business meetings to large social gatherings. For the convenience of the business traveller in Tokyo, the hotel also has a full-service Business Centre.

Providing the ultimate cosmopolitan retreat, Club on the Park is Park Hyatt Tokyo's health and fitness sanctuary providing an unparalleled range of state-of-the-art equipment, a 20-metre pool, a gymnasium and aerobics studio with panoramic views of Tokyo. Spa facilities are also available on the 45th floor of the hotel.

For the discriminating business and leisure traveller, Park Hyatt Tokyo is quite simply, one of the best hotels in the world.

Press Quotes

"Park Hyatt Tokyo, made famous in Lost in Translation, is the epitome of cool with its Batman towers, relaxed Napa-valley style service, and gentle interiors overlooking the thrilling chaos of the Shinjuku neighborhood." inTravel 07

Independent Reviews

Park Hyatt, Tokyo
By Nancy Lyon

It wasn’t exactly my idea of a Japanese flower arrangement, and it wasn’t exactly my idea of a Japanese rock garden, but I had to laugh, something you don’t do too loudly in discreet, polite Japan. My 44th floor hotel room in the Park Hyatt Tokyo - whose 50 square meter guestrooms are the largest in Tokyo (a city famous for its miniscule sleeping compartments) - was as serene as a Japanese tea ceremony. Its walls were paneled in rare water elm which had soaked in the northern lakes of Hokkaido for two thousand years. Its giant bed was sheeted with fine Egyptian cotton and fluffed with duvets. I could have lived for a week in the marbled bathroom - hung with brushed cotton kimonos, lit with paper lanterns, stocked with padded slippers and yukata sleeping robes, arranged with woven straw and lacquer boxes encasing toothbrush, hairbrush, shoebrush, razors, nail files - and read Shojun from cover to cover in the extra-deep soaking tub, or on the computerized, electronically-heated padded toilet cum bidet.

But it had been a strange surprise to open my guestroom door, hear the soothing drones of a koto and see a still-life of pink magnolias and cherry blossoms filling the giant TV screen. Electronic flower arrangements! And how startling it was to gaze through my room’s picture windows upon a formidable rock garden stretching to the horizon. A panorama of solid rock - concrete blocks jammed so closely together it looked streetless, impenetrable. Welcome to Tokyo... T

he- Park Hyatt Tokyo, designed as an exclusive residence for international business travellers in the heart of Shinjuku, Tokyo’s glitziest business and entertainment district, occupies the top 14 floors of the shimmering 52-story Shinjuku Tower. It’s only a 12-minute walk from the busiest subway station in the world - Shinjuku Station: a million and a half daily commuters.

The Park Hyatt opened in 1994 and already its New York Grill is the hottest restaurant in Tokyo, with reservations booked three weeks in advance. (No mean grill, but a fabulous take on Rockefeller Center’s Rainbow Grill - with glittering Tokyo skyline, California wine list a mile long, and open kitchen presided over by Tokyo’s only female Chef de Cuisine, Irish culinary wizard Angela Loftus.) The hotel’s two-story Japanese restaurant “Kozue,” run by Chef de Cuisine Kenichiro Ohe, (specially licensed in preparing the deadly delicacy fugu - the pufferfish) has tiered seating for stunning views of Mount Fuji. The Park Hyatt’s high-high-high tech fitness centre, whose door is so discrete it’s nearly invisible, is free for hotel guests but costs $55,000 to join and so many thousand a year. (But where else in Tokyo can you swim under a glass pyramid, and jog and shower with floor-to-ceiling views of the Kanto Plain and Mount Fuji?)

Some travellers travel to eat, but I am not one of them. I enjoy fine food, and am adventurous to the point of having tried jellyfish salad and fried alligator tails in Florida, boiled pig’s tails in Dublin, and at a “degustation” of insects at the Montreal Insectarium, a spicy roasted migratory locust brochette (a winged thing with bulging eyes impaled on a toothpick) washed down with ant wine (wine made from liquified ants). But unless I am hungry, food is something I never think about. In Tokyo however, where the Japanese obsession with food is omnipresent, you think about food all the time. How else to explain my eagerness to arise at 4 am, forsaking the luxury of Egyptian cotton for a pile of fish?

Ah, but it is the largest pile of fish in all of Asia. Tokyo’s Tsukiji (skee-jee) Market sells one-third of all the fish consumed in Japan, and Japan consumes one-sixth of all the fish in the world. If you want to see 15,000 fishmongers sniffing, pinching and eyeballing 2,500 tons of slimy raw fish flesh of 400 species, you go to this sprawling, boisterous warehouse district along the banks of the Sumidagawa River at 4:30 a.m.

The stakes for the 5:20 a.m daily auction are high. The bidders in blue coveralls and high rubber boots look like modest factory workers, but each of these 1,152 nakaoroshi has paid over one million dollars to obtain his bidder’s licence. The morning I’m there, a single giant Pacific tuna caught off the coast of British Columbia is auctioned off for $US 35,000!

Wandering past silvery tuna being sliced into sashimi slivers, and crates squirming with squid and eels, I look down to see piles of sneering lips on fat toady bodies - enough pufferfish (genus Fugu) to kill off Tokyo’s 12.3 million inhabitants. Why do the Japanese play culinary roulette with a nerve poison 160,000 times more potent than cocaine - so potent that a lethal dose can rest on the head of a pin? Because when all but a trace of the teterodox toxin in the 11 deadly parts of the fish is removed by one adept in the art, diners who don’t die get a terrific gourmet high.

The Tsukiji Market is a model of Japanese society: crowded, ordered, efficient, rich, thriving on variety and ingenuity, and filled with extremes--pale green, perfectly rounded, unblemished winter melons as beautiful as Kabuki dancers and octopi as ugly as Sumo wrestlers.

Tokyo department store basements are other places to gawk at Japanese food fetishes. These multi-storied merchandising miracles offer a cradle-to-the grave sideshow of services--from printing wedding invitations, selling baby souvenir paraphernalia, to arranging funerals. You can learn Japanese flower arranging--with real flowers--or scuba diving in a window tank fronting a street full of onlookers, and you can leave your kid on the rooftop playground while you go shopping for five hundred dollar mushrooms.

Yes, I took photos of them as proof. Even in Japan, where everything is inflated and a bottled Coca Cola in a corner teashop costs $US5, paying $US500 for a five-inch long shitaki mushroom, even one finely shaped like a phallus, seems rather excessive. Fortunately, there were other less costly mushrooms at only $US200.

In Japan, packaging and presentation are everything. One day I ended up in a Tokyo wholesale district that reminded me of Canal Street on New York’s Lower East Side for its stores upon stores selling culinary accessories. Then abruptly the store windows were filled with colorful displays of amazing food. Amazing because it was all fiberglass.

The fake food industry in Japan, now that’s a whole other kettle of fish. The broiled eels and steamed lobsters and shrimp and delicately boxed Nigiri-zushi and Chirashi-zushi and bowls floating with noodles were obviously not created by the chefs of the restaurants in whose displays windows they’ll end up. But what the diff... Delectable decoys to get the salivaries going, that’s all that matters.

After five days of sushi and sashimi and raw this and that and horseradish and seaweed for breakfast, I began to appreciate the runaway success of the Park Hyatt Tokyo’s New York Grill. Now I know that it’s really Angela’s daring, inventive cuisine they’re raving about. But my soul for a well-baked potato!

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• The Park Hyatt
  By Caroline Major

  The Park Hyatt is a popular Tokyo hot-spot. It’s often filled with smartly dressed locals meeting and dining in the bamboo garden, having rather grand lunches in Girandole and in the oh-so-fashionable New York Grill, looking out over the Shinjuku skyscraper district and Mount Fuji to the south. The public areas are spacious and light with Louvre-like pyramids topping each of the three towers. On a bling day, have your sunglasses handy.
  
  
  
  The hotel features a fabulous onsen, or traditional baths. Separate for men and women, this special place is the business. Wash first in the showers then head into the inner sanctum of cleanliness (not forgetting it’s next to godliness!) for an immersion in the 41-degree water. When you’re done, a dip in the 21-degree refreshing pool will get your heart racing and you’ll be ready for the sauna. Repeat the circuit until you’re exhausted - then head outside to pamper yourself with the luxurious Aesop body lotions. Stretch out with the latest in the international style magazines and a cup of tea while Tokyo seethes below you.
  
  
  
  The rooms:
  The corridors here, with their sea-green walls, are some of the most enveloping hotel corridors ever. Let your imagination carry you away and it can feel as though you’re swimming to your room. Inside, they are the biggest Tokyo has to offer, with views to the south of pulsing Shinjuku and Mount Fuji in the distance. To the north, the Tokyo megopolis continues.
  
  
  
  Rooms are spacious and you’ll want for nothing. There’s a walk-in wardrobe and a sizable bathroom stocked with wonderful Aesop botanicals from Australia. They smell divine and will leave your skin feeling better than when you walked in. Lather up and sink back into the tub to watch the ubiquitous flat screen - after you’ve satisfied yourself that you know what every function on the washlet toilet does. Once you’re clean, either head for the New York Grill at the top of the tower or snuggle into bed with one of the books from your shelf and read about Japanese culture while tucking into the delicious Park Hyatt branded mini bar goodies. The home-made rice crackers are divine. Alternatively you could just switch on the 37 inch flatscreen and watch non-stop anime on tv. It’s a comfortable place to be.
  
  

  © Travel Intelligence. All rights reserved

• "47th-floor health club offers stunning views of Tokyo and Mt Fuji"