You’ve already read the first part, right? Terrific! Right, on we go!
As mentioned previously, due to not having a traditional club lounge available, Diamond Globalist members and/or those staying in suites or club level rooms receive a full buffet breakfast in the The Café restaurant.
If you passed by the The Café on the previous day, you could have viewed a handy guide as to the wait times you might expect before entry.
Though I arrived slightly before seven and experienced no delay.
The promise of a full buffet is fulfilled by a wide range of hot meat and vegetable dishes, and a chef at the ready to cook eggs to your liking.
That big ham in the background doesn’t cut itself either
In addition to egg and ham related services, the chef can also prepare other foods, such as these made-to-order banana pancakes
Toppings are self-service
And this is only the tip of the foodberg:
Unfortunately it started getting crowded before I could get a clear shot of the salad bar.
After all of this, you’ve more than enough energy to start your day. Sure, you could partake in a day at Universal Studio Japan, which you should do if you have never experienced a large-scale, American-style, non-Disney amusement park in your life, but an option that I prefer even more is exploring the immediate area around the hotel using Hyatt Regency Osaka’s free bicycle rental.
Despite offering a service on par with the Park Hyatt Tokyo, it is mentioned nowhere on the Hyatt Regency Osaka website, resulting in the bicycles themselves literally begging to be used.
It is really a shame that the hotel doesn’t promote this service more prominently, as the relative isolation of the hotel, combined with large, bicycle friendly roads, make this an excellent low-cost, low-carbon footprint option for a day’s worth of entertainment. I don’t want to spoil all of the fun of discovery, but here’s a taste of a few of the sites that await you:
After a morning of exploration, you can return to the Lobby Lounge, which opens from mid-morning as the Globalist/Club Level lounge, offering complimentary beverages, cookies, and fruit. While most of the beverages are of comparable quality to a standard club lounge, the royal milk tea is of an unbelievably high quality, a stupendous triumph of brewing that is guaranteed to delight at least three of your five senses.
As usual, my picture fails to do it justice.
Before evening service begins, the Lobby Lounge is also open for regular business as a paying restaurant, and sometimes the area set aside for club access guests gets scrunched to accommodate special events run by the Lobby Lounge restaurant. During my stay, they offered the Crazy For Strawberries dessert buffet promotion. Of course, this is not included in the complementary refreshments, but it looked so good that I had no choice buy to pay to experience it for myself.
This, like the Diplomat Suite deserves an entire post dedicated to it someday, but here’s a photo that represents the type of quality you can expect from the Hyatt Regency Osaka Lobby Lounge.
Unfortunately, the Crazy For Strawberries promotion ended today. But fear not, as last year’s very popular Matcha Madness promotion is set to return from April 1st. I haven’t actually tried Matcha Madness yet, so I asked the Matcha Man what it’s like.
Edit: It’s actually called Matcha Mania, but I’m too proud of my joke to take it out.