Shiroyama Hotel Kagoshima

Shabby but restaurants are great

The restaurants that we tried, Tempura Keiten and Sushitei Sakura, as well as Bakery Shiroyama were all excellent. The staff in all were great and the food was outstanding. The tempura was some of the best we had in Japan and the sushi was actually the best meal we had while in Japan. We liked the sushi place so much we went twice. The bakery has some really delicious breads, particularly the maple flavoured loaves, that we actually ended up getting every day for breakfast so that we could avoid going to the repulsive breakfast buffet. The shuttle bus makes it reasonable to stay here because the hotel is located on top of a hill that would make it difficult to get to without the shuttle bus. The shuttle bus makes several stops around Kagoshima allowing you to get to the main tourist and shopping areas pretty easily. Though it does take about 30 minutes to get from the hotel to the last stop by the ferry terminal.

The hotel is sorely in need of a major refurbishment and cleaning. Our room had a very uncomfortable bed that was lumpy and kept me awake more than asleep. The bathroom was actually dirty with hard water deposits and long term grunginess in the shower. The rug was similarly unpleasantly in need of a cleaning, as well. I was actually surprised by how unclean and run down the room was after reading some of the other reviews. The breakfast buffet was horrible, with Western food consisting of nothing but cold egg dishes (and not purposely cold). Sadly, even the Japanese items on the buffet were not well prepared. It all looked like leftovers from the night before. We ended up trying it twice and gave up in disgust and just started getting items from the bakery for breakfast every day.