Some meals are more memorable than others. In 1988, Robert De Niro met the English director Roland Joffé, with whom he had recently made The Mission, at a restaurant in Los Angeles called Matsuhisa. The restaurant had opened a year earlier and Joffé had become a regular, but it was De Niro’s first visit. The actor ordered black cod miso – a discreet slab of marinated fish topped with a single strand of pickled ginger root – and drank the Japanese sake Hokusetsu.
At the time there were few Japanese restaurants in De Niro’s native New York – the New York Times felt the need to explain to its readers what sushi was as late as 1995 – and the freshness of the taste of that fish on De Niro’s tongue seems, in retrospect, like something of a revelation. He was immediately hooked. He invited the chef, Nobuyuki Matsuhisa, out from the kitchen to have a drink. Matsuhisa, Nobu to his friends, had little idea who De Niro was and spoke only broken English, but the pair established a bond. Thirty-six years later that one precise plate of cod has spawned a restaurant empire that includes 56 restaurants and 19 hotels across five continents.
Longevity is not the norm in restaurants: 60% go out of business in the first year; only a fifth survive five years. By the time he had got to LA, Matsuhisa was well versed in that fact. Having trained as a sushi chef in Tokyo, he came to the US via failed restaurants in Lima and Buenos Aires, starting with an unlikely venture in Anchorage, Alaska; after seven weeks that restaurant burned down. The big gamble of his Beverly Hills outpost made him reluctant to take up De Niro’s suggestions to open a second restaurant in New York. It was six years – and many black cod later – before the actor persuaded him to cross the continent. Their first joint-venture Nobu opened near De Niro’s home in Tribeca 30 years ago this month. Matsuhisa was 45.
By that time, it felt that the pair – they were joined by the film producer Meir Teper – had fate on their side. Matsuhisa projects a degree of humility, but he has rarely been slow to spot the main chance. Early on, he managed to link his initial restaurant with Oscar night success. Three-times-failed Oscar nominee Robin Williams dined at Matsuhisa the night before his Academy award for Good Will Hunting in 1988. Roberto Benigni repeated the trick the next year, and was so convinced of Nobu’s part in his triumph that he avoided the Oscar night parties and took his statuette back to the restaurant to a standing ovation.
Nobu came to New York with that mythology. Timing had a lot to do with it. The new financial elite of young Wall Street bankers and sports and entertainment stars prized control. They worked hard in the gym. Minimalist opulence was their new aesthetic. They colonised loft spaces in former warehouse districts like Tribeca and were drawn to similarly spartan dining experiences; – no French sauces and white tablecloths. They wanted to spend their fortunes while projecting a degree of edgy asceticism. A perfect plate of yellowtail sashimi laced with slivers of jalapeño fit the generally eye-watering bill. Gwyneth Paltrow was an inevitable early Nobu adopter.
When Nobu opened in London’s Old Park Lane in 1997, it borrowed a lot of that transatlantic cachet and added a dash of Cool Britannia: Liam Gallagher and Nicole Appleton chose Nobu to announce their relationship to the world; David and Victoria Beckham were early visitors, as was Diana, Princess of Wales. (In Nobu: the Cookbook, Matsuhisa recalls their meeting as if it were a haiku sequence: “I remember she drove a BMW; she came without a single bodyguard. I made her a light meal, vegetable tempura and lobster sashimi.”)
Still, it was Boris Becker who infamously established the first European outpost as the playground of the private jet set. Becker’s name will be for ever linked to Nobu for the fateful night in 1999, after he had bowed out from his last Wimbledon, when he ended up in one of the Mayfair restaurant’s broom cupboards with the Russian model Angela Ermakova, generating a baby daughter nine months later, a paternity suit and the beginning of his financial fall from grace. The restaurant was described in the Evening Standard as “knickers-off Nobu”.
Sitting in the vast – and near-empty – bar of the third London Nobu, in Shoreditch, on Thursday evening, sipping a modest beer and wondering whether a couple of minuscule sea bass croquettes (£28) might be a legitimate expense claim, I was pondering the question of whether celebrity notoriety can ever be a recipe for longevity. The cavernous space, with its restaurant and open kitchen beyond, is in the basement of a Nobu hotel; it feels a little like an homage to a pre-financial crash Britain, great glass “industrial” doors and expensively applied graffiti on a terrace and a trip-hop playlist. I wonder who this appeals to. I suppose to those for whom the financial crash never happened.
The original Nobu London launched in the fin de siècle era of Terence Conran’s revived Quaglino’s and Oliver Peyton’s palatial art deco Atlantic Bar & Grill and Damien Hirst’s ill-fated Pharmacy. In each case coolness came and fairly quickly went. Nobu has not only survived and grown but also, it appears, maintained a degree of its A-list pulling power, at least in its signature locations (in 2015, the Atlanta rapper Future collaborated with Drake on a track which repeated the word Nobu for five minutes before offering the payoff: “I just throwed a private dinner in LA”).
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Speaking to me last week about the reasons for the chain’s continued expansion, its head of operations for the UK and Europe, Andrew Milne, suggested the basics of special food and customer service and obsessive attention to detail are the key factors. “In a business with a high turnover of staff, we’ve got people that have been working since day one in London – 27 years,” he says. “Hands on is super important. Meir and Bob and Nobu are involved in everything. Nobu travels 10 months of the year, and if he’s in this part of the world, I’m travelling with him. He works from 9 o’clock in the morning until 11 o’clock at night in different locations, being in the kitchens. He is 75 but never talks of retirement. It’s like, you know: ‘Food is my life. The restaurants are my life. This is what gives me the most pleasure.’ That won’t change.”
Counterintuitively, the other thing that seems unlikely to alter is the Nobu group’s continual search for its next location. To mark the 30 years since the launch of the Tribeca restaurant, new Nobus have opened in Toronto, Forte dei Marmi in Tuscany, and New Orleans; Bangkok and Madrid are in the works. Milne insists the growth is organic. “A lot of it comes through long-term guests who might say: ‘Well, why don’t we do something over there?’” In the meantime, it seems, the most rarefied of those customers are prepared to go to any length to fill the rock shrimp tempura gaps in their lives: a journalist who worked for 10 days as maitre d’ at both New York Nobus, suggested that their most common version of takeout was delivered by private jet: “We’ll do at least 20 of those orders a month and more during busier weeks like spring break,” a colleague told him.
In such ways, Matsuhisa has, in 30 years, surprised himself by changing many things, including the price of fish. When he started out, he used black cod in his signature dish because it was cheap: “Maybe 25¢ to 30¢ a pound frozen,” he said, in a recent video. “Now the price is more than $15 a pound. Sorry – it’s my fault.”