Is Aman Tokyo still Aman Tokyo?
Ask that question in any fat-travel thread and you'll get two different hotels described back to you. One is the 33rd-floor arrival everyone remembers for years — the washi ceilings, the Imperial Palace Gardens laid out under floor-to-ceiling glass, a soaking tub that people still bring up unprompted a year later. The other is a hotel that can't get hollandaise right and charges you double what Aman Tokyo is worth for the privilege. Both descriptions are current. That's the actual story — not a collapse, not a golden age, a hotel that's splitting down the middle.
What the recent reports say
The last twelve months of reports are dominated by one specific, oddly narrow complaint: in-room breakfast. Guests in mid-2026 describe broken hollandaise, dry bacon, and Western dishes that read as an afterthought — one comparison to a mid-tier US chain hotel, which is a brutal thing to say about a property charging Aman rates. One guest posted a photo from three months earlier that looked completely different — better plated, properly composed — suggesting this isn't a permanent kitchen failure so much as inconsistency shift to shift. Multiple people note the American breakfast used to arrive with a full condiment set; now it doesn't. Nobody's saying the same about the Japanese breakfast or about Musashi's counter, which stays out of the criticism entirely.
Alongside that, the sushi-reservation problem persists — concierge can't reliably get top omakase bookings — and there's a recurring comparison to Bulgari Tokyo, where guests report being remembered by name across multiple staff and a more private lobby experience. One thread runs an extended Aman-vs-Bulgari-vs-Palace comparison and the Aman doesn't come out ahead on service, only on the bathing ritual and the room views. A May 2026 report from a summer-holiday stay specifically flags the front desk as "ordinary" during a quiet period — the property empty enough that the usual Aman feeling didn't show up.
What changed
Go back to mid-2025 and the tone is different. Reports from June 2025 describe the in-room Japanese breakfast as genuinely exceptional — taste, presentation, plating all singled out — and staff, including the same restaurant manager, Niccolo, still mentioned by name a year later in the current verdict, are credited with the kind of anticipatory service Aman is supposed to deliver. The complaints that existed then were about service turnover and inconsistency, not about food quality specifically. Breakfast wasn't the problem in 2025. It is now.
So the delta isn't "Aman Tokyo got worse." The hard product — the room, the pool, the view, the tub — reads identically in both periods, praised with the same specifics a year apart. What's moved is one soft-product line item: the Western in-room breakfast, which looks like a kitchen or staffing change on that specific service, not a property-wide decline. The sushi-booking and reservation friction was already there in 2025 reports too — that hasn't shifted, it's just gotten louder as Bulgari gives people something to compare it against.
Aman Tokyo hasn't gone downhill — the room and the ritual are exactly what they were; the in-room Western breakfast, specifically, is worse than it was a year ago.
Where it's heading
If you're booking for the hard product — the arrival, the tub, the Musashi counter, the pool that reviewers keep saying has no peer in the city — nothing in the recent evidence changes the calculus. If in-room breakfast matters to your stay, order Japanese, or don't expect the American plate to match what it was in 2025. That's a narrow, fixable problem, not a trajectory. Book it for what it still does better than anyone else in Tokyo; don't book it expecting Western eggs benedict to be the highlight.
