Why you should experience Empire Steak House Roppongi in Tokyo, Japan.
Empire Steak House Roppongi is a cosmopolitan steakhouse where Roppongi's international dining culture, New York chophouse tradition, dry-aged American beef and the Sinanaj brothers' Manhattan career converge in the center of Tokyo.
Set along Roppongi-dori near Gaien Higashi-dori and just steps from Roppongi Museum, the restaurant translates the large-format steaks and seafood of its New York parent into a dining room built for extended dinners. USDA Prime beef undergoes dry aging before a custom 900-degree broiler builds the dark exterior fundamental to the house style. Porterhouse, filet and sirloin keep the focus on American steakhouse cuts, supported by shellfish and classic sides designed for sharing. The result is a Roppongi restaurant where the Sinanaj family's New York steakhouse experience arrives in Tokyo through the same dry aging, intense broiler heat and communal cuts that built Empire's reputation in Manhattan.
What you should know about Empire Steak House Roppongi.
Empire Steak House Roppongi is best known for becoming the Sinanaj brothers' first restaurant outside the United States when it opened on October 17, 2017. Russ, Jack and Jeff Sinanaj had immigrated to New York from Montenegro and spent years at Peter Luger Steak House, learning meat sourcing, butcher relationships, restaurant operations and service before creating Empire Steak House in Manhattan in 2010. The young company quickly accumulated six consecutive appearances in the Zagat Survey between 2011 and 2016, building sufficient momentum for an international expansion only seven years after the first Empire opened. Roppongi became that expansion, making the Tokyo restaurant both Empire's Japanese debut and its first overseas operation. The opening introduced the brothers' USDA Prime, dry-aged steak program to Tokyo alongside the Emperor's Steak, an Empire signature joining chateaubriand and sirloin on a 900-gram bone-in cut. A Japanese intellectual-property judgment later fixed the opening date at October 17, 2017 and described the considerable attention generated by Empire Steak House's arrival in Roppongi, placing the restaurant's international debut within a formal dispute over the company name. Nearly a decade later, Roppongi remains Empire's Japanese base, extending the restaurant created by three Montenegrin immigrant brothers through Peter Luger and Manhattan into its longest-running international outpost.
Porterhouse gives the dinner its clearest New York reference, joining filet and sirloin around the T-bone after dry aging concentrates the USDA Prime beef and the custom 900-degree broiler develops a deeply browned exterior. The Emperor's Steak enlarges that contrast through 900 grams of bone-in chateaubriand and sirloin, allowing the tender center cut and more assertively beefy loin to be tasted from the same platter. Sizzling Canadian bacon provides a smoky, fatty prelude before creamed spinach and potatoes absorb the juices carried from the steak plates. Shellfish changes the temperature entirely through oysters, lobster and jumbo shrimp, giving cold sweetness and salinity room between the heavier cuts. Empire Steak House Roppongi works as a shared progression through shellfish, broiler char, dry-aged beef and classic sides, preserving the generous proportions and communal rhythm of the Manhattan steakhouse from which it descended.
How to fold Empire Steak House Roppongi into your trip.
Empire Steak House Roppongi works as the dinner anchor for an afternoon moving through three institutions that transformed Roppongi into one of Tokyo's strongest concentrations of contemporary art, design and architecture during the early twenty-first century.
Begin at Mori Art Museum, opened on October 18, 2003 atop Roppongi Hills Mori Tower with David Elliott as founding director and Happiness as its inaugural exhibition, establishing contemporary art as a central component of Minoru Mori's Roppongi Hills project. Continue to The National Art Center, Tokyo, where Kisho Kurokawa's undulating glass building opened in 2007 as one of his final major works, expanding Roppongi's cultural transformation through an institution conceived. Conclude at 21_21 Design Sight, founded by Issey Miyake and opened in March 2007 after his decades-long campaign for a Japanese design institution, with Tadao Ando placing 80 percent of the building underground beneath a folded-steel roof derived from Miyake's “A Piece of Cloth” concept. The progression moves from Mori's high-rise contemporary-art project through Kurokawa's museum architecture into Miyake and Ando's design collaboration, revealing the cultural transformation that reshaped Roppongi before dinner at Empire Steak House.
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