Home / Tokyo / Cocktail Bars / Bar High Five, Ginza cocktail bar · $$$ · No. 5 on our 50 best cocktail bars in the world
Descend a staircase into a Ginza basement and you arrive at a pilgrimage site. Bar High Five is a small, timber-countered room, around a dozen seats at the bar, with a handful of tables, presided over by Hidetsugu Ueno, one of the most revered figures in Japanese bartending and a hero to bartenders the world over. There is no menu; Ueno reads your taste through conversation and builds a cocktail for you, hand-carving a block of crystal-clear ice into a flawless diamond as he goes. We rank it fifth in the world because precision here is never for show, it is hospitality raised to an art. That discreet basement door and no-menu intimacy also earn it a place, at No. 5, on our 25 best hidden gem bars in the world.
Hidetsugu Ueno
Ueno learned his craft under Hisashi Kishi at Ginza's Star Bar, a former IBA World Cocktail Champion, working alongside him for close to two decades,"I gave my thirties to Star Bar," he has said, before opening High Five in 2008. He has become perhaps the greatest global ambassador for Japanese bartending, judging at world competitions, teaching seminars abroad, and drawing a steady stream of visiting bartenders to his counter. In 2016 he was named International Bartender of the Year at the Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Awards, the industry's most prestigious honour.
He is best known for two feats of craft. The first is his ice: he scores a large block with a cleaver, taps it through with a wooden mallet, then whittles it with a short, hand-sharpened Japanese knife into an enormous, glittering diamond in about a minute. The second is his mastery of the "hard shake", a technique that inserts air and controls the ice inside the shaker to chill and texture a drink. It's worth noting, since the point is often muddled, that the hard shake was invented by another Ginza legend, Kazuo Uyeda of Tender Bar; Ueno is one of its great practitioners, not its originator.
No menu, all hospitality
"The concept of Bar High Five is that it has no concept," Ueno has said. "I don't have a menu. Our cocktails are tailor-made, one by one." Over the course of an evening he and his head bartender, Kaori Kurakami, learn your likes and dislikes through conversation and small tastings, then build classics and twists calibrated exactly to you. What could be intimidating is instead disarmingly warm: Ueno consciously rejects the stereotype of the silent, severe Japanese bartender in favour of an easy, conversational manner. The precision, the temperature, the dilution, the posture, the ice, is, in his words, "just part of our way of treating guests."
The drinks
The bar's calling card is the White Lady, gin, Cointreau and lemon juice, served ice-cold and immaculate. In summer, Ueno's Bellini made with fresh Japanese peaches is a thing of beauty, and Japan-only serves like the sakura-scented Full Bloom show off his willingness to play within the classical idiom. Because there is no list, the best approach is simply to describe what you enjoy, a spirit, a mood, sweet or dry, stirred or shaken, and let the bar do the rest. The back bar leans heavily on Japanese and Scottish whiskies among a deep international selection, so whisky lovers are especially well served.
The genius of the no-menu format is that it turns every visit into a small collaboration. A skilled guest who can articulate what they enjoy, a spirit, a level of sweetness, a mood, will be rewarded with something built precisely to that brief, while a curious one who simply asks Ueno to decide will be taken somewhere they would never have thought to go. Either way, the drink that arrives is not pulled from a list but composed in the moment, which is why regulars can return again and again without repeating themselves. It also means the bar meets you where you are: a newcomer nervous about Japanese bartending's reputation for formality will be gently put at ease, while a visiting professional can push into rare bottlings and technical detail. Few bars flex so naturally to the person on the stool.
The accolades
High Five has been a fixture of The World's 50 Best Bars since early in the ranking's history, peaking at No. 3 in 2013 and sitting at No. 18 as recently as 2019. In 2020 it received the Heering Legend of the List award, the marquee honour recognising the most consistent performer over the ranking's history, an accolade it shares with a tiny handful of the world's greatest bars and one that can only be won once. At Asia's 50 Best Bars it has been named Best Bar in Japan and has continued to place on the list. For a room this small and this unshowy, that record is remarkable, and it reflects the esteem in which the global industry holds Ueno.
Visiting
The bar's fame and its small size mean it is often busy, so calling ahead is wise; the room opens evenings, Monday to Saturday, and closes on Sundays. Note the address, too: High Five moved in 2015 into its current Ginza basement premises at the Efflore Ginza 5 building, so older listings pointing to a fourth-floor location are out of date. Prices are more reasonable than the bar's reputation might suggest, reputable listings put the average cocktail around the mid-teens in dollars, though a full evening naturally adds up. Dress smart, arrive with an open mind, and let Ueno guide you.
It sits at the heart of the greatest bar district on earth. Pair it with the Ginza classicists,Star Bar and Tender Bar, and the alchemical Bar BenFiddich across town for a definitive Tokyo cocktail crawl. Our full guide to Tokyo's cocktail bars and the wider Tokyo bar guide cover the rest.
A lineage from Star Bar
Ueno did not arrive at his craft alone. He came up under Hisashi Kishi at Ginza's Star Bar, one of the most respected rooms in a district full of them, and a former IBA World Cocktail Champion. For close to two decades Ueno worked at Kishi's side, absorbing the exacting Ginza school of bartending, the reverence for ice, the economy of movement, the belief that technique exists to serve the guest, before opening his own bar in 2008. That pedigree matters, because it places High Five within a living tradition rather than a personal style. Ginza bartending is passed down like a martial art, master to apprentice, and Ueno is both an inheritor of that lineage and, now, one of its most important teachers. When you drink at High Five, you are tasting the distillation of a school that stretches back generations, refined and made warm by a single remarkable practitioner.
The diamond, up close
No description of the bar is complete without dwelling on the ice, because it is where Ueno's precision becomes visible art. He begins with a large block of dense, clear ice, scores it with a cleaver, then taps it ap