Okada Fudosan replaces Japan's first sweets theme park with a dining-and-gallery complex in Jiyugaoka
Okada Fudosan is opening mimimi JIYUGAOKA today, a 940-square-metre complex of four restaurants and a gallery on the upper floors of La Cour Jiyugaoka — the same floors that once held Jiyugaoka Sweets Forest, Japan's first sweets theme park — a concrete case of how Tokyo's ageing single-purpose retail anchors are being rebuilt around dining and culture.
Okada Fudosan Co., Ltd. and its group company Okada Reality Co., Ltd. said they will open mimimi JIYUGAOKA on October 9, a roughly 940-square-metre complex of four restaurants and an art gallery built into the second and third floors of La Cour Jiyugaoka in Meguro-ku, Tokyo. The space takes over the floors that once held Jiyugaoka Sweets Forest, a sweets theme park Okada Fudosan opened in the same building in November 2003 as Japan's first of its kind.
The complex, about a five-minute walk from the south exit of Jiyugaoka Station on the Tokyu Toyoko and Oimachi lines, is built around three strands the companies call taste, see and fruit — four restaurants, an art gallery and a small farm corner — pitched as a cultural hub for a neighbourhood approaching the 2027 centenary of Jiyugaoka Gakuen, the elementary school that gave the area its name. Admission is free.
The four restaurant tenants are new brands rather than existing shops relocated in: guu table, a bistro running a lunch buffet, an afternoon café and a dinner menu; HoaHoa, serving more than ten styles of pho alongside a signature flower hot pot; Yohaku, an Edomae sushi concept from the teams behind Ginza's Hakkoku and Hiroo's Sushidan; and LALA PASTA, a fresh-pasta kitchen made to order from Hokkaido wheat, a sister shop to LALA CAFE in Biei and run by a chef trained at a Michelin-listed restaurant in Italy, the companies said.
The gallery soft-opened on September 19 with a solo show by the artist Yuta Okuda, running to October 12, and is launching what the companies call an Art to Table series pairing the gallery's programme with the restaurants: guu table is serving a limited menu, mimimi bouquet, from October 9 to November 17, built around a dish devised by Kenta Onodera, owner of the restaurant CHA, and inspired by a roughly 130-centimetre canvas Okuda painted for the show. An opening-day ribbon-cutting was scheduled for 11:30am, with free merchandise for early visitors.
Okada Fudosan's chief executive, Kazuya Okada, said Jiyugaoka should grow into a version of itself that offers work and play as well as comfortable living, and described the complex as a deliberate step toward that goal. The company was founded in Jiyugaoka in 1964.
Converting a shuttered, single-purpose attraction into a multi-tenant restaurant-and-gallery floor is a textbook move for an ageing retail anchor on a smaller shopping street, where dining and culture now do the work that novelty retail once did. Okada Fudosan, a landlord founded in Jiyugaoka itself, is wagering that the district's draw now runs through restaurants and small-format culture rather than a single headline attraction.
What is worth watching is whether the Art to Table format — a gallery show feeding a limited restaurant menu — becomes a repeatable house format for mimimi's programming, or whether the opening rush settles into a quieter, more conventional food hall once the season's launch events are over.