Nikko Kanaya Hotel Main Dining Room

Dining at the Nikko Kanaya Hotel is a step directly into the history of Western hospitality in Japan. Opened in 1873, the Kanaya is the oldest Western-style resort hotel in the country, and its Main Dining Room has been serving travelers for well over a century. The story began when Kanaya Zenichiro, a musician at Nikko Toshogu, took in the American missionary and scholar James Curtis Hepburn, who had nowhere to stay; word of the family's hospitality spread among foreign visitors, and at Hepburn's suggestion the home was turned into an inn. The grand main building that stands today, on a wooded hillside just above the sacred Shinkyo Bridge, followed in 1893.

The dining room itself is a treasure. Ornately carved pillars and beams — decorated with the same kind of craftsmanship found in Nikko's shrines — rise above white-clothed tables, and the guest book reads like a roll call of history, with names such as Ulysses S. Grant, Isabella Bird, Albert Einstein and Charles Lindbergh among those who slept and dined here. Eating beneath those carvings, with mountain light coming through tall windows, you feel the weight and romance of Japan's early encounter with the West.

The kitchen keeps that heritage alive on the plate. The signature dish is nijimasu no meuniere — local rainbow trout pan-fried in butter, a recipe the hotel has served for generations — alongside its famous "hundred-year curry," a deeply developed beef curry whose lineage stretches back through the hotel's long history. Rich French-influenced beef dishes, soups and desserts round out a menu that has changed remarkably little, precisely because guests return for it. Local ingredients, including Nikko's beloved yuba, occasionally find their way into the cooking.

A meal here works beautifully as either a special lunch in the middle of shrine-hopping or an elegant dinner to cap a day in the mountains. Lunch is the easier and more affordable entry point; dinner is more formal and worth a reservation, and smart-casual dress suits the surroundings. Non-diners are welcome to admire the lobby and history displays, but the food and the room together are the real reward.

The hotel stands on the hillside just above Shinkyo Bridge, about a 20 to 25 minute uphill walk from Tobu Nikko or JR Nikko Station; a short ride on the World Heritage bus to the Shinkyo stop saves your legs, after which it is a brief climb. Combine dinner with a stroll to the vermilion Shinkyo Bridge glowing in the evening light, and you have one of the most atmospheric experiences in Nikko — a taste, quite literally, of the hospitality that first opened Japan's mountains to the world.