Art Bar Shuten-Doji — Restaurant in Tokyo

I'm going to start this review saying that, despite my aversion to bars with expensive alcohol, touts advertising outside, and rude bartenders, I had an absolute blast at this place.

The reason why is that it totally depends on the other customers there. Normally, it seems this place will draw in plenty of friendly foreigners that will be fun to drink and sing with, but I was lucky to have an exceptionally fun co-customer with that made the night unforgettable.

As for the staff:

The first interaction I had was with the young Chinese tout working outside. She was honest about the competition and genuinely fun to chat with, so I decided to give the bar a try.

I go inside and within about 40 seconds of reading and considering the menu, I ordered a 1000 yen Jameson shot. For some unclear reason, the red-haired lady was yelling at me about how she got me the menu, seemingly annoyed with my purchase. Yet still, I ended up buying at least 4600-5400 yen of drinks and helped bring in more business when there was only a few more people in the bar. So I'm not sure why, but it felt like she'd singled me out for clear dislike from the beginning and made me feel unwelcome.

Despite this, I decided to stay, and had a fairly good night, choosing crowd favorites and helping with pulling everyone together. However, towards the end of the night, the red haired bartender decided that, even though myself and others had been putting on songs for hours, that it was time to yell at me about how the karaoke device was "her machine, don't touch my machine" and so on, which doesn't make any sense given the context of an karaoke bar as they presented it and we had already been doing for hours. The last chance was when someone, likely the red haired bartender, removed Chop Suey from the playlist, despite this being one of the crowd favorites.

The locals and foreigners alike united to make it fun still, but this bar is immensely overpriced with bar staff that are mediocre at best. I'll be going elsewhere in the future and I recommend you do so too, Champions Bar across the way will sell you alcohol cheaper, with 100 yen per karaoke song as the caveat. I brought friends another night to check it out, and when we saw the red haired lady, we kept on going.

You can have fun here if the red haired bartender isn't there or if she decides to not try to ruin your night. I've never met a bartender who was so upset with me spending an outrageous amount of money on the easiest drinks...

The lady with the red hair that serves you is totally rude, they don’t know how to properly use the machine for the music and they don’t have any explanations of how to use it. I put my song in priority because I was told so by another customer and she literally screamed at me and told me I would have to pay for everyone’s drink (plus the next one wasn’t even my song) another customer explained that if that button shouldn’t be used it shouldn’t be on display as in other bars. Totally unnecessary to scream at a customer, super rude. There’s people that are just not destined to customer services and she is one of those. Embarrassing just don’t go there is...

The best bar in Shinjuku! We go there every weekend and always have fun. The drinks are great and are always made strong :) As a foreigner woman, this place is the best, because the AMAZING bartender always looks out for me and my friends and is so kind. I feel safe and happy there. The bathroom is always clean and available. You can sing whatever you want and however much you want (as long as you buy one drink per hour). I can't recommend enough! Thank you to the staff for the...