Nobu & Caviar with Chef Nobu
I hadn’t expected to talk to one of the world’s most famous sushi chefs about Greek salad. To hear him lecture how to cut vegetables as if he were teaching a geometry lesson. But this doubles as a portrait of Nobuyuki “Nobu” Matsuhisa. On the one hand, he’s curious, even insatiable, wanting to dissect and then put back together what makes the best version of a dish. On the other, he’s a disciple of simplicity and classic culinary techniques. Of letting ingredients speak for themselves, with the support of the sharpest of knives.
Nobu is always tweaking, inventing, but some changes he doesn’t like. “Young chefs in Greece have changed the Greek salad. I like the original from twenty years ago: vegetables and feta, olive oil and oregano. But now there’s grated feta.”
“Grated?” my voice quivers.
“For me this is too complicated,” he replies. “And the cucumbers are sliced too thin. There has to be texture.” As a rebuttal he now serves his chunky “Greek Salad Nobu Style” in Mykonos, Los Angeles, and Tokyo.
Some changes he insists on, and he’s known for a rare skill: coaxing people to try new foods. Many of his famous dishes were born as culinary compromises, like “Squid Pasta” and “New Style Sashimi.” His most recent dish he calls “Umami Sea Bass.” “I don’t want to waste anything,” he explains. “We use a lot of vegetables. You peel the skin of a carrot, but don’t use it. You use the white part of the leek, but not much of the green. So I collect all vegetables that would become trash, blend them with garlic and ginger and dried chili, a little bit of spice, and then six or seven percent sea salt.” He then puts the paste to work as a marinade.
When I credit him with what in my family of picky eaters is surely a superpower, he modestly smiles “Me?” and adds: “Yes, because of experience. People say ‘fusion,’ but I don’t like to say fusion because fusion sometimes means confusion,” he laughs. “My food is very simple, very clean. Then a touch of Peruvian influence, or, now French or Italian. This is why it is Nobu style, not fusion.”
And Nobu style clearly works. His restaurant empire dots five continents – some wear his first name, others his last. Nobu’s biography reads like a movie script. Born in Saitama, Japan, in 1949, his father died when he was eight. As a teenager he got a gig as a dishwasher at a Shinjuku sushi restaurant, where he trained for seven years. At 24 he moved to Lima, Peru, where he became fluent in cilantro and ceviche. After a spell in Argentina, he opened a restaurant in Anchorage, only for an electric fire to swallow it in flames two weeks later. His next stop was Los Angeles, where he debuted Matsuhisa in 1987. Robert De Niro became a regular and courted Nobu with the prospect of a New York outpost. Nobu cast De Niro as “the man who waited four years”; they’ve been business partners ever since Nobu New York opened in 1994.
Today Nobu is less of a chef and more of a conductor, overseeing and fine-tuning his namesake restaurants around the world. Matsuhisa Munich is not new. What started as a pop-up turned into a restaurant, in 2015, but, as Madonna put it, when Nobu opens a restaurant the whole town changes. All these years later, its name remains in local tabloids. In part, this is due to the fact that it remains Nobu’s only ambassador in Germany, but even more so it’s due to the celebrity studded events it hosts, like February’s “Shibuya Crossing Party,” the dinner I’ve been assigned to, where Nobu himself would play the starring role. Historically Munich was, and still is, a court city – a place to be seen.
Celebrities, famously, love Nobu. During the pandemic, the restaurant made headlines like “Kendall Jenner Ignores L.A.’s Stay-at-Home Order to Go Out to Dinner at Nobu with Friends.” And last year its uptown NYC branch was the site behind the news that “Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift Hold Hands in First PDA Photos Since Whirlwind Romance.”
The Shibuya Crossing Party, held at the luxury Mandarin Oriental hotel's own Matsuhisa Munich, and hosted by General Manager Dominik G. Rainer, promises to be no different: a belated Valentine to monied Munich, the likes of football stars, including self-proclaimed Raumdeuter (Space Investigator) Thomas Müller, who cuts toward the sake bar as soon as I clock him, plus models with cheekbones sharp enough to slice glass with, and the kind of guests who outfit their phones with light reflectors to optimize their selfies.
The food moves as quickly as the cameras. Faux sakura flowers float from the ceiling. A man shuffles across the carpeted lobby, topping up glasses from a bottle of Veuve so big it would cause a crisis at airport security. Nobu watches, a smile widening on his face. “Which account do we live in on Instagram?” asks the moderator, the actress and personality Palina Rojinski, before introducing the celebrity chef to the crowd.
From the start, I’m aware of two things. First, it’s probably safe to say I’m the only historian in the room. Second, the menu will feature seafood, which disobeys the city’s geography – Munich is “Pretty much slap-bang in the middle of Europe,” as Adele put it when she announced her August residency; “a bit random, but still fabulous!” In the thick of Europe’s sausage belt, Munich is a literal meat museum. Instead, the menu gestures toward Nobu’s top culinary hits, but refuses to play his number one (“Black Cod with Miso,” because he wanted to serve something new). The opening act is a Nobu signature: “Yellowtail Jalapeño Caviar.” The second of seven courses is “Toro Yuzu Miso” – the plate oiled with white miso, landscaped with micro greens and mushrooms. Tailing it is “Matsuhisa Sushi Selection,” which resembles a grocery store’s refrigerator section: white fish and mackerel, tuna and salmon.
After we have a handful of show-off appetizers and five earlier dishes below our belts then comes “Kagoshima Wagyu Goma Truffle Teriyaki.” “There was a cooking competition where a chef prepared wagyu,” the publisher to my left tells me. “And the judges said next time he needs to actually cook something.” Wagyu is cheating. The vegetables that accompany it are so cold it must have been on purpose? At this temperature, the steamed broccoli is the kind that ruins childhoods. I glance over at another plate. The vegetarian stand-in is an acrobatic balancing act of green asparagus – piled with truffles, of course.
Before the meal, when I had Nobu to myself, I asked him about the ingredients he uses, like how he came to serve tuna steak at a time when it was unorthodox. He had purchased a whole tuna, some 150 pounds, and wanted to use it all. “Kind of like eye to eye, the tuna was watching me. Buy me,” Nobu giggles. And, more to the point: “People like steak in America. When I cooked the toro it melted, like butter.”
Tastes change. So do ingredients and the environments they come from. Nobu’s reputation is so entangled with bluefin that in the early 2010s there was a movement to boycott his restaurants for refusing to take the then-endangered fish off the menu. “We still use bluefin,” Nobu tells me, “but mostly farmed.” Also called a ranch, a tuna farm is a softer way to describe making this giant fish, which can never stop swimming, repeat laps in a 50-meter circle for fifteen or even twenty years – like a merry-go-round without an emergency exit.
Outside, the rain persists. It’s the kind of weather that makes freshly blow-dried hair a waste: no matter how good it looks, there’s no escaping reality. A remix of “Break My Soul” hides behind small talk. Dancers turn the staircases leading to the restaurant into a stage. I chug my champagne to free my hands to grab blini layered with sour cream and Imperial caviar (and because I was raised to never abandon champagne). To end the meal, the “Nobu Cheesecake” arrives, rich as the evening. The yuzu sorbet is perfect. I could eat it forever. While it perfumes my mouth, it makes me – at least momentarily – forget reality even while indulging in it, completely. The Nobu experience, indeed.
