Over the past year, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time at home, seldom traveling beyond the borders of my immediate Tokyo neighborhood. By January 2021, I’d slipped further into sartorial apathy and even began dressing like some of the elderly Japanese men on my block — in rumpled cardigans worn over mismatched athleisure. The only difference was that I had not yet fallen to grocery shopping in plastic bathroom slippers.
But with spring in full bloom and the lifting of the second state of emergency in Tokyo on March 22 penciled into my calendar, the desire to venture out — of both my house and my pajamas — is gradually returning. A recent sunny Sunday afternoon finally prompted me to don a skirt and a pair of heels plundered from the depths of my closet and head to Virtu.
The bar, which debuted last autumn on the 39th floor of the sleek Four Seasons Hotel Tokyo at Otemachi, adjoins contemporary French restaurant Est and is situated at the end of a magnificent corridor lined with books about gastronomy. The “library” conceals a vault that houses a store of rare spirits and barrels for ageing cocktails.