Both my visits to Main Beach, the strip of restaurants looking over Takapuna Beach have taken place in winter, which may be missing the point of the place. I suspect the area is at its best on a summer's day, when the view stretches down to the doughy cliffs at the south end and Rangitoto lies, in Bruce Mason's words, "spreadeagled on the skyline like a sleeping whale".
On a bitter, windswept Saturday evening in the nastiest part of last month, the punters were staying away in droves. But Tokyo Bay was busy - and it is not hard to see why.
The name is more evocative if you haven't seen the real Tokyo Bay, a heavily industrialised port zone on largely reclaimed land that doesn't really ooze the refined and restrained beauty that is so easy to find in Japan.
But the restaurant's interior (you can take a 360-degree virtual tour on the website) is a thing of beauty: huge blond blocks of laminated wood seem to float in the air above the bar; a facing roughcast wall has little niches in which handsome pottery is displayed; a school of silver aluminium fish swirls overhead.