A third Whisky Lab bar is coming to Kyoto. Whisky Lab. Shijo Karasuma (ウイスキーラボ・シジョウ・カラスマ) opens on November 16, 2026, with a soft opening from November 6. It follows the group’s bars in Gion (祇園) and Pontocho (先斗町). The bar is a joint project between Liquor Mountain (リカーマウンテン), a liquor retailer with shops across Japan, and the Tanks (タンクス) bar group, one of the best-known names in Kyoto’s bar scene. For visitors, it adds a whisky-focused stop in the city’s central business district, away from the crowds of the Gion and Kamogawa riverside nightlife.
What the new bar offers
The bar sits on the third and fourth floors of a building whose lower floors house a busy izakaya. The operators describe it as a hideaway: guests walk past the noise of the izakaya and climb into a quiet room. There is a counter for solo drinkers and private rooms for small groups. The menu centers on whisky and other spirits, and the food comes from Kinkaku the After Point, a craft beer and pasta restaurant near Kinkakuji (金閣寺) run by the same bar group. It includes stone-grilled fresh pasta, house-made bacon and simple bar snacks.
The company behind the venue is GL Dining (GLダイニング), a Liquor Mountain group company that also operates franchises of the Kushikatsu Tanaka (串カツ田中) restaurant chain. It opened the first bar in the series, Whisky Lab. Kyoto Gion, in October 2025. Day-to-day operation of the bars is contracted to a company set up by the Tanks group, whose owner Hidetada Sano (佐野秀忠) runs Imadegawa Bar Tanks, Annie Hall Bar at Kyoto Station and Kinkaku the After Point.
The Whisky Lab concept is led by bartender Ryuhei Ogino (荻野竜平), previously of Annie Hall Bar. According to the announcement, the bars experiment with new ways to drink and mix whisky, and during the day they double as venues for seminars and events.
Opening hours are 4:30 p.m. to midnight, and the bar is closed on Sundays. The address is 3F–4F, 664-29 Bandoya-cho, Nakagyo-ku, Kyoto (京都市中京区阪東屋町664-29). The announcement does not list prices, a cover charge or the whisky list, so we cannot say which bottles will be on the back bar.
Kyoto has no shortage of good bars, and many of its classic whisky counters are small rooms built around regulars. A venue with a “lab” theme, daytime seminars and a stated aim of testing new serves takes a different approach, one that can be easier for a first-time visitor to walk into. The group has now opened three of them in about a year.
Why this matters
The interesting part is who owns the bar. Liquor Mountain is a retailer. Its business is selling bottles, and in Japan a whisky drinker’s first encounter with a new bottle is often a highball or a measure at a bar, not a purchase in a shop. By partnering with an established bar group rather than building its own bar team, the retailer gets credibility and know-how it could not easily develop in-house. The Tanks group, in turn, gets the capital and supply network to expand faster than an independent bar operator usually can.
This kind of arrangement is becoming more common as Japanese whisky demand shifts toward experience. Distilleries now invest heavily in visitor centers, and Japan’s whisky tourism has grown alongside inbound travel. Kyoto is the clearest case: visitors arrive in large numbers, often after a day at the Yamazaki distillery, which sits between Kyoto and Osaka, and want somewhere to keep drinking Japanese whisky in the evening. A bar that offers seminars and private rooms is set up to serve that audience as well as local drinkers.
It also fits a wider pattern of multi-site whisky bars in Japan’s big cities. In September, we reported on Bar Shinkai opening a fourth Tokyo bar near Shiba Park. Small groups with a recognizable bartending style are expanding into chains of three or four venues, which makes it easier for first-time visitors to find a reliable whisky bar without relying on word of mouth.
For readers outside Japan
If you are in Kyoto from mid-November, the bar is an easy addition to an evening downtown. The Shijo Karasuma area is served by the Karasuma Line subway at Shijo station and by Hankyu trains at Karasuma station. Note the Sunday closure. You can visit during the soft opening from November 6 to 15, but the full menu and hours may only settle after the official launch on November 16. Annie Hall Bar, run by the same group at Kyoto Station, is another option on arrival or departure days. Because the announcement gives no prices, budget as you would for any Japanese whisky bar, where table charges are common and rare bottles are priced by the measure. The bar’s Instagram account (@whisky_lab.karasuma) is the best place to check for opening updates, and the phone number listed for reservations is 075-320-0328.
If you are new to Japanese whisky, asking for a highball or a mizuwari is a good way to start; our guides to the Japanese highball and mizuwari explain what to expect. To pair a bar visit with a distillery, Kyoto has its own craft producer, covered in our Kyoto Miyako distillery guide, and our list of Japanese whisky distilleries shows what else is within reach by train.
Source: Liquor Mountain via PR TIMES (Japanese)