We Found a British Pub Above a Shopping Mall in Osaka

Lily’s eye exam at an Abeno optician wrapped up mid-afternoon, and with nowhere particular to be before dinner, we wandered the shopping complex above it the way you do when a kid’s appointment leaves you with a few open hours in a part of town you don’t usually linger in. A few floors up, past the usual mix of clothing shops and a food court, there it was: an English-style pub, dark wood, pints on tap, a menu in English, tucked into a Japanese shopping mall like it had always belonged there.

We didn’t piece this together until later, but the shopping complex we were wandering sits at the base of Abeno Harukas, a 300 meter tower that opened in March 2014 and held the title of Japan’s tallest building for nearly a decade, until Azabudai Hills’ Mori JP Tower in Tokyo passed it in 2023, the same Azabudai Hills complex we’ve written about elsewhere on this site. The building’s first 16 floors alone make up the largest single shopping mall in Japan, 160,000 square meters of stores, restaurants, and apparently at least one English pub, stacked beneath an observation deck, a hotel, and an art museum higher up the tower. We never made it up to the observatory that day, an eye exam and a wandering evening don’t leave room for everything, but knowing the scale of the building we’d been drinking inside changed how the whole stop read in hindsight.

It wasn’t a planned stop, there’s no receipt to work from, so we’re not going to invent an exact total for that one evening. What we can say honestly is that English-style pub chains are a real, well-documented fixture of Japanese shopping centers, not a one-off we happened to stumble into. HUB, the best known of them, has run since 1980 and built a following among both locals and expats on convenient locations, English menus, and no cover charge, a real rarity for a bar in Japan. As of 2025, a pint of Kirin runs about 900 yen there, their own Hub Ale or Craft IPA closer to 1,050, and a pint of Guinness around 1,100. Daily happy hour from 5 to 7pm drops a Kirin pint to 950 yen bundled with a free food dish, or 750 yen for wine, a highball, or spirits with food included. Whether the pub we found that evening was HUB specifically or one of its competitors, we can’t confirm from the photo alone, but the pricing pattern across the category holds: a round of beers and a shared plate for the table lands well under what the same order would cost at a standalone Western-style bar.

Was it worth it

Completely, and mostly because of how little it needed to work: no reservation, no dressing for it, just an open evening after a kid’s eye appointment and a mall floor we hadn’t explored yet. A tired kid can sit with headphones and a plate of chips while the adults get an actual pint rather than a vending-machine can, and that trade is worth more on a long trip than the yen amount on any single receipt. Stacking a routine errand and an unplanned pub stop into the same afternoon is the kind of day that doesn’t make it into most trip itineraries, but it’s closer to what a longer stay in Japan really looks like than a checklist of attractions would suggest. If a shopping complex anywhere in Japan has an upper floor you haven’t checked, it’s worth a look, you might find exactly this.