Home / Tokyo / Cocktail Bars / Bar BenFiddich, farm-to-glass cocktail bar, Nishi-Shinjuku · $$$ · No. 2 on our 50 best cocktail bars in the world
If Atlas is the most spectacular bar in the world, Bar BenFiddich is the most singular. There is nowhere else quite like it, a candlelit room on the ninth floor of an anonymous Shinjuku tower where one man, Hiroyasu Kayama, grows his own botanicals on a family farm, distills his own absinthe, rebuilds Campari and amaro from raw herbs, and stirs your drink with a twig snapped from a juniper branch. To sit at his counter is to watch cocktails made the way they might have been two centuries ago, by someone who treats the bar less as a workplace than as a laboratory, an apothecary and a shrine. We rank it second in the world because no other bar is inventing its ingredients from the soil up.
Finding it
Part of the spell is the approach. You take a lift up a nondescript West Shinjuku high-rise, and the doors open not onto a lobby but onto a dim landing and a heavy, lacquered wooden door. There is little signage and no fanfare. Behind the door is a tiny room, the bar's own listing puts it at just seventeen seats, and other accounts describe fourteen or fifteen, so call it intimate by any measure, lined with deep shelves of infusion jars, oblong carafes of experimental liqueurs, dried wormwood and, watching over it all, a mounted buck's head. Renaissance lute music plays softly. The effect is somewhere between a Victorian herbalist's study and an alchemist's cell, and it is entirely deliberate.
The alchemist: Hiroyasu Kayama
Kayama grew up in a farming family in Chichibu, in Saitama Prefecture, surrounded by soil, cattle and a mountain his family had owned for decades. He began bartending at twenty and spent more than six years as head bartender at Bar Amber in Nishi-Azabu before opening BenFiddich in 2013. The turning point in his thinking was a fascination with Europe's great herbal spirits, absinthe and Chartreuse above all. Unable to buy the rare botanicals he needed in Japan, he made a decision that would define the bar: he would grow them himself.
Today he tends a farm back in Saitama where he cultivates and dries rare herbs, and has spoken of planting hundreds of juniper trees with the ambition of becoming one of Japan's foremost juniper growers. His curiosity is not confined to home soil, either, after one awards trip he flew on to Nairobi to forage berries from East African juniper. Behind the bar he wears the white jacket of the classic Japanese bartender, though his version is habitually stained purple and green, as if you had interrupted him mid-harvest. Reputable writers have called him "perhaps the closest thing to a 21st-century alchemist," and it is not hyperbole.
Farm to glass
The concept is often summarised as "farm to glass," and BenFiddich takes it further than anyone. Kayama's homegrown and foraged plants are broken down and rebuilt into the building blocks of classic drinks: he distills his own absinthe, using wormwood, anise, juniper, chamomile, fennel, mint and yuzu; he reconstructs Campari and amaro from a dozen carefully chosen herbs; he steeps and infuses at the bar, working from yellowed antique European distilling manuals. The back bar is, in one writer's phrase, "a veritable apothecary of vintage liqueurs and oblong bottles filled with tinctures." A large terracotta mortar and pestle sits within reach, and he will crush fresh herbs to order, plucking them from a branch in front of you.
No menu: what you'll drink
There is no printed menu. Kayama asks what kind of spirit you're in the mood for, the four foundations are whisky, gin, absinthe and amaro, and improvises almost entirely off the cuff, which means no two visits, and no two guests' drinks, are ever quite the same. Absinthe is the house standout, and the bar keeps a formidable collection of it; his own version is worth requesting for the sheer theatre of watching it built. One firsthand account describes an absinthe cocktail lengthened with gin and fresh herbs crushed in the terracotta mortar, finished with honey drawn from absinthe drippers mounted above the bar, grapefruit juice and egg white, whipped to a froth and poured into a chilled Art Deco glass.
Ask for a Negroni and you'll get one remade with vintage vermouth and house bitters; ask for something long and herbaceous and you might receive a farm-fresh julep built with fennel and mint from Saitama and sipped through a century-old pewter straw. The through-line is that everything tastes of somewhere specific, of a plant, a season, a hillside, rather than of a brand. Prices are not fixed and vary with what you drink, but expect roughly the equivalent of a serious cocktail bar's rates per glass; this is craft you pay for, and it is worth it.
The name
Everyone assumes the name is a play on Glenfiddich whisky, and everyone is wrong. It is a Gaelic rendering of Kayama's own surname: written with the characters for "deer" and "mountain," his name maps onto the Scottish Gaelic elements for mountain (ben) and deer (fiddich),"Ben Fiddich." There is a pleasing echo, since Glenfiddich itself means "valley of the deer," but the derivation is personal, not a pun. It is a small thing that tells you a great deal about the man: even the sign over the door is a puzzle rewarding those who look closely.
The accolades
The wider world has caught up with what Tokyo drinkers long knew. On The World's 50 Best Bars, BenFiddich has climbed steadily and dramatically: No. 48 in 2022 (as Japan's lone entry that year), No. 37 in 2023, No. 25 in 2024 and No. 18 in 2025. On Asia's 50 Best Bars its record is even stronger, No. 9 in 2021, then No. 5 in 2022, when it was named Best Bar in Japan and collected the Legend of the List award for consistent ranking; No. 4 in 2023, its highest Asian placement, alongside the Roku Industry Icon Award for Kayama himself; and further top-ten finishes since, including another Best Bar in Japan honour. That trajectory, driven in large part by Kayama's turn toward farming, is one of the most compelling stories in the modern cocktail world.
Visiting
BenFiddich's size is both its magic and its main obstacle. With so few seats and a single bartender at the heart of everything, reservations are strongly advised; walk-ins are sometimes possible early, but you may be booked in for another night. Come with patience and an open mind, this is a place to surrender to the bartender's choice rather than to arrive with a fixed order. Hours can shift, so it's worth confirming before you set out, and the experience rewards an unhurried evening over a quick round.
It also belongs to one of the greatest bar cities on earth. If you're building a Tokyo itinerary, pair it with the Ginza classicists elsewhere on our list,Bar High Five, Tender Bar and Star Bar Ginza, for a study in precision, and with the more bohemian Bar Trench in Ebisu for contrast. Our full guide to Tokyo's cocktail bars and the wider Tokyo bar guide map out the rest.
The absinthe, and the wormwood on the wall
If there is a single spirit that defines BenFiddich, it is absinthe. Kayama's fascination with the great European herbal liqueurs was what set him on the path to growing his own botanicals, and absinthe is where his obsession runs deepest. He distills his own, and the back bar carries a formidable range of the spirit, bottles green and gold, some cloudy with age, catching the candlelight. Dried wormwood, the plant at absinthe's heart, hangs in bunches around the room, a reminder that the raw material of the drink in your glass may have been grown, cut and dried by the same hands that are shaking it. Mounted above the bar are absinthe drippers that yield the honeyed water he laces into certain serves, and the whole apparatus, the jars, the tinctures, the antique oblong bottles, gives the space the feel of a working still as much as a bar.
His curiosity does not stop at Japan's shores. Kayama forages internationally when the opportunity arises; after one awards ceremony he continued on to Nairobi specifically to gather berries from East African juniper, and back home in Saitama he has spoken of planting hundreds of juniper trees with the ambition of becoming one of the country's foremost growers. Every strand of this, the farming, the foraging, the distilling, feeds back into the glass, so that a drink at BenFiddich is quite literally a taste of the ground Kayama works.
A night of surprises
Because there is no menu and Kayama improvises around your chosen base spirit, no two visits unfold the same way, and part of the pleasure is not knowing what will arrive next. Firsthand accounts of evenings here describe a herbaceous gin and tonic served in an aroma-locking two-piece glass; a gin-and-pomegranate build bright with fresh fruit; a tequila serve finishe