Diamond Dining bets a flat price beats Ginza's course-and-drinks norm with a new all-inclusive kaiseki restaurant

Diamond Dining, the restaurant operator under DD Group, opened an all-inclusive kaiseki restaurant called Ginza Shiji on the eighth floor of the Albore Ginza building, a minute's walk from Ginza-Itchome Station, according to a release distributed via PR TIMES. Dinner service began 22 July and lunch followed on 25 July.

The restaurant packages an omakase kaiseki course built around wagyu and abalone with an "order-buffet" of tempura and charcoal-grilled dishes, plus free-flow access to more than 60 sakes, all inside a single set price: dinner from ¥15,000, lunch from ¥4,500 (which swaps the sake for a tempura buffet and non-alcoholic drinks). The 61-seat room, which includes private rooms finished with Kamism washi paper and lit by Tom Dixon pendant lamps, is open daily — lunch 11:30am to 3pm, dinner 5pm to 11pm — with no closing days, the company said.

The bet is on the price tag as much as the food. Ginza's fine-dining kaiseki restaurants overwhelmingly price by course and charge for drinks separately, leaving a bill that can run well past the menu price once premium sake or wagyu supplements are added — a structure that rewards restraint and can unsettle diners unfamiliar with the etiquette. Folding free-flow sake and an order-buffet into one flat number removes that arithmetic, trading some of the exclusivity signalled by an à la carte bill for the predictability that has made all-inclusive pricing a fixture of casual dining and, increasingly, hotel bars — a formula Diamond Dining, better known for its themed and concept restaurants than for classical kaiseki, is now testing at the top of the market rather than the bottom.

Whether the flat-price format holds up against Ginza's traditional prix-fixe houses, or whether guests trade up to more courses and premium sake anyway, is the question Ginza Shiji's early trading will start to answer.