Punch Room Tokyo named Japan’s highest-ranked bar — The Japan Times
Punch Room Tokyo, a bar at The Tokyo Edition Ginza hotel in Tokyo, Japan, ranked 23rd in Asia’s 50 Best Bars 2026 and became the highest-ranked Japanese establishment on the list. Over the year, the bar climbed 13 positions; it opened two years ago, The Japan Times reports.
Japanese ingredients on the menu
The venue’s bar director is 40-year-old Yasuhiro Kawakabo. Punch Room Tokyo accommodates 86 guests and is part of the Punch Room bar network at Edition Hotels. In the Tokyo version of the concept, every drink contains a Japanese ingredient as one of its key components.
The menu is built around five traditional punch components: alcohol or a spirit, citrus, a sweet component, spices, and tea. Cocktails include the ¥2,600 Samurai-turned-Pirate, which contains Roku gin, Cointreau, ume-kombucha tea made with kombu seaweed and Japanese plum, absinthe, kaffir lime leaves, and bonito.
Kawakabo named the ¥2,700 Kappa & Yuzu his most popular drink. The cocktail, named after the Japanese mythical creature kappa, combines doburoku — unfiltered cloudy sake — tequila, yuzu, cucumber juice, and vanilla tea.
More current news is available on the UA.News Telegram channel Telegram.
Yasuhiro Kawakabo’s career
Kawakabo became interested in bartending in 2001, when he was a teenager working for a scaffolding company in Ibaraki Prefecture. He studied cocktail-making using bartender Kazuo Ueda’s book “Cocktail Techniques,” and in 2005 began working at a Bagus darts bar venue in Tokyo’s Shibuya district.
He later worked at Hibiya Bar Ikebukuro and Bar Libre, and also had brief stints at D.Bespoke bar in Singapore and Restaurant Pages in Paris. Kawakabo was also a guest bartender at the Mandarin Oriental in Tokyo. In 2020, he began working at Bulgari Tokyo Ginza Bar, and joined Punch Room Tokyo in 2024.
According to Kawakabo, Bar High Five, SG Club, and Bar Benfiddich had previously held, in turn, the highest ranking among Japanese establishments in Asia’s 50 Best Bars.
