Why you should experience HUB Shinjuku South Exit in Tokyo, Japan.
HUB Shinjuku South Exit is a convivial British-style pub where Shinjuku Sanchome's after-work drinking culture, nearly four decades of local history, draught ale and televised sport converge inside one of the chain's longest-running Tokyo addresses.
Set along Shinjuku-dori near Koshu Kaido and just steps from Shinjuku Takashimaya, the pub divides its crowd between basement and upper-floor rooms built for drinking without the ceremony of a formal bar. Pints move quickly from the counter as football and other major sporting fixtures pull attention toward the screens, recreating the collective viewing culture that inspired HUB's original British-pub concept. Fish and chips, roast beef and smaller drinking plates keep the food deliberately compatible with beer across an evening that can begin with one pint and extend through several rounds. The result is a Shinjuku Sanchome pub where a 1989 opening, counter ordering and communal sport give the chain's British reference point unusually deep roots in the neighborhood.
What you should know about HUB Shinjuku South Exit.
HUB Shinjuku South Exit is best known for opening in 1989, making it a surviving branch from the turbulent first decade of a British-pub project conceived by Daiei founder Isao Nakauchi. Nakauchi had repeatedly traveled to Britain and became fascinated by the pub as a social institution, prompting Daiei to establish HUB in March 1980 before the first branch opened in Kobe's Sannomiya that April and Tokyo's first followed in Roppongi in August. The experiment expanded rapidly but struggled financially, and the original HUB company dissolved in 1986 after reaching ten branches; Captain Cook preserved the pub business inside Daiei before another reorganization transferred it to Rikishaman in September 1989. HUB Shinjuku South Exit appeared during that same year, with the company's own chronology preserving its opening pamphlet under the earlier Shinjuku Sanchome name. The chain then spent the 1990s recovering its original British direction: fish and chips, Bass Pale Ale and London Pub Guinness entered companywide sale in 1994, and the successful HUB Ikebukuro East Exit opening in June 1997 supplied the prototype for the modern business. The present HUB company arrived in May 1998 with ¥490 million in capital and inherited 15 pubs from Rikishaman that September, carrying the Shinjuku branch from Daiei's experimental restaurant years into the independent chain that followed.
A pint of HUB Ale gives the bar its clearest starting point, bringing pronounced malt body and bitterness through a beer delivered directly from the brewery and poured in full-, three-quarter- or half-pint measures. Guinness changes the glass toward roasted malt and stout richness, and Punk IPA pushes in another direction through a more aromatic, hop-driven profile. Fish and chips then makes the British reference tangible through thick cod beneath a crisp fried coating, with tartar sauce providing richness and malt vinegar available for sharper acidity. Roast beef with mashed potatoes slows the progression into softer textures before another pint returns attention to the bar. The counter-ordering system keeps those rounds fluid, letting beer, food and televised sport determine the length and pace of the night.
How to fold HUB Shinjuku South Exit into your trip.
HUB Shinjuku South Exit works as the drinking anchor for an evening tracing southern Shinjuku through imperial landscape design, postwar fashion education and the large-scale commercial architecture that transformed the station's southern edge during the 1990s.
Begin at Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden, where former Naito family land became an experimental agricultural station after the Meiji Restoration before French landscape architect Henry Martinet helped reshape it into the imperial garden opened in 1906. Continue to Bunka Gakuen Costume Museum, whose collection grew from the educational work of Bunka Gakuen and preserves clothing as evidence of changing Japanese and international dress traditions. Conclude at Shinjuku Takashimaya, where the 1996 opening of Takashimaya Times Square extended Shinjuku's commercial center southward during the major redevelopment of the railway lands around the station. The progression moves from Meiji landscape experimentation through twentieth-century fashion scholarship into Shinjuku's late-century commercial expansion, placing a 1989 pub inside the broader transformation of the station's southern districts.
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