Palace Hotel Tokyo

Palace Hotel Tokyo

At 1-1-1 Marunouchi, an address that reads like a claim and largely is one, Palace Hotel Tokyo faces the Wadakura moat and the stone walls of the Imperial Palace East Gardens, eight minutes on foot from Tokyo Station and linked underground to Otemachi. The site has been a hotel since the Hotel Teito, which was sold to private buyers in 1959, demolished, and replaced by the original Palace Hotel, a ten-storey, 450-room building that opened on 1 October 1961 ahead of the 1964 Olympics. That hotel closed in 2009, was taken down, and rebuilt over three years by Mitsubishi Jisho Sekkei as a 23-storey tower anchoring a larger mixed-use development, reopening on 17 May 2012 with 284 rooms, 18 of them suites, many with balconies looking straight over the moat to the palace. It is still owned by Palace Hotel Co., the private company Masatomo Yoshihara founded in 1961, now run by its president Daisuke Yoshihara, which makes it that unusual thing in central Tokyo, a grand hotel with no international chain behind it. The interiors are quiet to the point of near-silence, pale woods, washi, stone, and neutral fabrics chosen so the windows do the work, with continuity from the old building carried in specific objects: some of the 1.6 million Shigaraki-yaki tiles from Shiga Prefecture that once clad the 1961 façade have been reused inside, and the original counter of the Royal Bar was salvaged and reinstalled, the room around it done in velvet, leather, and dark wood for martinis and cigars. There are ten restaurants and bars. Esterre, run with Ducasse Paris, holds one Michelin star under chef Kei Kojima, who trained with Alain Ducasse and Franck Cerutti from 1988 and cooks Japanese produce (Kumamoto beef, freshwater eel over charcoal) through French technique. Wadakura, the Japanese restaurant, houses a 20-seat counter run by Shinji Kanesaka alongside a tempura bar, Tatsumi, and a teppanyaki grill, while Amber Palace does Shanghainese and Cantonese and Grand Kitchen, the all-day room, has a terrace on the moat. The evian SPA, the brand’s only one in Japan, takes 1,200 square metres of the fifth floor, with an indoor pool and gym alongside. What it feels like is a very well-run instrument. Service is precise and unhurried, the kind of omotenashi that anticipates without hovering, and in 2024 it became the first Japanese hotel awarded three Michelin Keys. The view is the defining luxury, a rare stretch of water, pine, and moss-dark walls in the centre of the city, and on a balcony at dawn with the joggers circling the moat below you understand why people return for a decade. It suits the traveller who wants Tokyo’s order rather than its spectacle, who will eat seriously at least once in-house, and who values quiet competence over theatre. You should not come if you want a neighbourhood to wander out into at night: Marunouchi is a business district, polished and fairly empty after office hours and at weekends, and the hotel is large enough to carry a steady flow of conferences, banquets, and weddings through its lower floors. The design, handsome as it is, leans towards corporate restraint, not the kind of personality you might want from a smaller boutique hotel, though the windows more than compensate. You should come for the palace-side rooms, the Royal Bar, a Kanesaka lunch, and the rare sense of sleeping beside the stillest acreage in Tokyo. The short version: An independent, family-controlled 284-room hotel in Marunouchi, rebuilt in 2012 on the site of the 1961 original, facing the Imperial Palace moat, with one Michelin-starred Esterre, a Shinji Kanesaka sushi counter, and balconies over the palace gardens.