[Yokohama] A Kyoto Breakfast at Hotel New Grand: Rice or Porridge on the Fifth Floor

Hotel New Grand offers a few choices for breakfast. On an earlier stay I took the Western one on the ground floor, looking out at the water. This time I went up to the fifth floor instead, to Yugyoan Tankuma Kitamise — a Kyoto restaurant, with its main house in Kyoto, that keeps a room inside this Yokohama hotel.

Stepping out of the lift, there is a stone panel with the name cut into it in gold, and fresh flowers set in front. A latticework screen stands further in. At just past seven in the morning the corridor is still silent, and the pattern in the carpet seems unusually vivid.

The only decision: rice or porridge

The menu at the entrance offers exactly two options in the morning: the Japanese breakfast, or the Kyoto rice porridge. Both are 4,500 yen including tax and service. Up to a point they are identical — four small appetisers, a grilled fish, a small dish, a simmered course, miso soup — and they part ways only at the end, with either freshly cooked rice or porridge under a thin sauce. Service runs from seven to ten.

So there is only one thing to decide this morning. Rice, or porridge. On a trip, that narrow a choice is something of a relief. I took the rice.

On the rightness of grilled salmon

The tray arrives with more on it than I expected. Four appetisers in a lacquered box, something dressed in white, cod roe, a vinegared salad. Simmered vegetables in a celadon bowl, greens with sesame, four kinds of pickles, miso soup with chikuwa and wakame. In the centre, grilled salmon and rolled egg.

The salmon was the thing. The fat was right, the salt was right; nothing pushing at you with a loud flavour. Perhaps it is age, but this quality of rightness has come to taste best to me. Every small dish was pitched the same way, built so that the flavour of the ingredient itself stays behind at the back of the mouth. The nori, too, had a striking aroma.

At first I thought it was too much. Counting the appetisers and the simmered dish and the small bowls, I wondered whether I could finish it at this hour. But each portion is modest and no two flavours overlap, and by the time I noticed, the tray was empty.

I like a Western breakfast with a view of the sea. A Kyoto breakfast works on you differently: nothing showy appears at any point, and yet when it ends you are entirely satisfied. It is worth folding one morning like this into a trip.

More from Yokohama

• Breakfast at Le Normandie, Hotel New Grand — the Western morning at the same hotel
• Nine seats at Katabami — a courtyard sushi counter on the Shinko pier
• Sunday brunch-hopping at BASEGATE Yokohama Kannai
• The Westin Yokohama club floor

Visited in August 2026. Prices and opening information are as of the time of the visit.