Why you should experience HUB British Pub in Tokyo, Japan.
HUB British Pub is a convivial pub where Shimbashi's after-work drinking culture, British public-house traditions, communal sports viewing and a Japanese company lineage reaching back to 1980 converge beside one of Tokyo's busiest commuter stations.
Set near the Ginza side of Shimbashi Station and just steps from Old Shimbashi Station Railway History Exhibition Hall, the basement pub channels the district's evening crowds into a counter-ordering format built around pints, mixed drinks and British pub food. Football, baseball and rugby take over the screens on major match nights, shifting individual drinking into a shared room organized around the action. Fish and chips, meat pies and HUB Ale keep the British reference concrete once the first round reaches the table. The result is a Shimbashi pub where the salaryman culture surrounding the station meets a drinking model that HUB has spent decades adapting from Britain for Japanese cities.
What you should know about HUB British Pub.
HUB British Pub is best known for descending from Isao Nakauchi's attempt to transplant British pub culture into Japan after the Daiei founder encountered it during a visit to Britain. Hub Co., Ltd. was created on March 18, 1980 as a wholly owned Daiei subsidiary, and the first pub opened in Kobe's Sannomiya district the following month; Tokyo followed that August with a Roppongi branch inside the newly completed Haiyuza building. The business passed through Daiei restaurant reorganizations in 1986 and 1989 before a prototype for the modern HUB format emerged at Ikebukuro Higashiguchi in June 1997 and the present company was incorporated under Daiei Holding Corporation in May 1998. Roppongi also became a crucial culinary testing ground: Guinness and fish and chips were introduced there before HUB expanded Bass Pale Ale, bottled Guinness and its British food program across the chain in November 1994, followed by its first draft Guinness installation at Tokyo Opera City in April 1999. The Shimbashi Ginza Exit branch opened on February 27, 2016 as HUB's second operation around Shimbashi Station. Sports subsequently gave this branch a chapter of its own when HUB partnered it with rugby team NTT Communications Shining Arcs in August 2018, extending a sports-pub strategy that had begun with Kawasaki Frontale in 2003.
A pint at the counter starts the experience in the manner HUB has retained from British pub service, with each round ordered and paid for before the drink returns to the table. HUB Ale gives that ritual a house beer, then Guinness pulls the glass toward the Irish stout that became part of the company's British repertoire after the experiments in Roppongi. Fish and chips brings crisp batter and fried potato alongside the beer, its salt and richness providing the natural reason for another mouthful from the glass. A major football or rugby fixture changes the scale of the evening as attention turns toward the screens and reactions spread across tables that had been separate minutes earlier. HUB British Pub works best through that progression from counter to pint, fried food and shared match, translating the social mechanics of a British pub into the after-work rhythm of Shimbashi.
How to fold HUB British Pub into your trip.
HUB British Pub works as the evening anchor for a Shimbashi and Shiodome route tracing the railway, art collecting and performing culture that transformed this edge of Central Tokyo across three distinct periods.
Begin at Old Shimbashi Station Railway History Exhibition Hall, where the exterior of Japan's first railway terminal, opened in 1872 and destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake, has been reconstructed over surviving foundation stones from the original station. Continue to Panasonic Shiodome Museum of Art, opened in April 2003 after collecting Georges Rouault began in 1997, with holdings now numbering 270 works and extending from Rouault into architecture, craft and design. Conclude at Shinbashi Enbujo, opened in 1925 after Tokutaro Kawamura raised two million yen to create a theater for Azuma Odori, beginning a performance history later broadened through kabuki and other major productions. The progression moves from Japan's 1872 railway breakthrough through a collection devoted to Rouault and design into a theater born from Shinbashi geisha culture, revealing the unusually layered cultural history surrounding a night out in Shimbashi.
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