Nobu’s Best Dishes Defined Japanese Fine Dining in America

In the 2015 hype track “Jumpman,” Atlanta rapper Future follows up a chorus by his collaborator Drake with a rhythmic: “Nobu, Nobu, Nobu, Nobu, Nobu, Nobu / I just throwed a private dinner in LA.”

Future is, of course, referencing the high-end Japanese restaurant from chef Nobu Matsuhisa that opened in 1994. At the renowned chain, preciously plated, minimalist dishes reign: ponzu-splashed yellowtail sashimi veiled by slivers of jalapeño, crispy cubes of fried sushi rice crowned with chopped spicy tuna, and stark plates of salty-sweet miso black cod. Revelers take bites of lightly battered tempura popcorn shrimp while enveloped in the pulsing sound of lush electronica. These aren’t all dishes invented at Nobu, but they are so canonically tied to the restaurant and other high-end Japanese lounges that they’re almost mandatory on menus in the genre, like buttery garlic bread at an Italian American restaurant or baked macaroni and cheese at a soul food institution.

From Las Vegas and Houston to Marrakech and Kuala Lumpur, Nobu restaurants, almost always located in high-end neighborhoods or resort towns, follow a formula of striking modern interiors, where sightlines from every seat offer clean views across the room to see who’s there. That’s because dining at Nobu is not only the pinnacle for its frequent celebrity visitors like Future, Taylor Swift, and Leonardo DiCaprio, but for many people who want to emanate the effortless wealth and refinement that Nobu represents.

Nobu is where untouchable famous people come in and intersect with the earthly realm. In Nobu the Cookbook, Matsuhisa recalled serving the late Princess Diana at his London restaurant: “I was struck by the firmness of her handshake when we first met. I remember she drove a BMW; she came without a single bodyguard. I made her a light meal, vegetable tempura and lobster sashimi.” Matsuhisa name-drops other celebrities, such as Roberto Benigni, who came into Nobu New York shortly after winning his Best Actor Oscar; Gwyneth Paltrow; Robin Williams; and Kenny G, who later became a partner in the business at Nobu Malibu.

The original Nobu and the restaurants that resemble its distinct, ultra-aesthetic vibe became the preferred places for the famous — and the almost famous — to eat. In the 2000s, West Hollywood’s Koi was where scores of paparazzi snapped hard-flashed photos of Miley Cyrus, Paris Hilton, and David Hasselhoff. West LA restaurant Hamasaku allowed celebrity clientele to name some dishes, like Charlize Theron’s spicy tuna tacos. Nobu, still one of TMZ’s most mentioned restaurants, conjures so many visions of modern hedonism that the New York Times once said it was where “time itself goes almost syrupy” with the merging of splendor, fame, and early-2000s style.

How did this Japanese cook — who journeyed through Anchorage, Lima, and Buenos Aires — create the quintessential kind of celebratory restaurant for an entire generation of Hollywood stars and star-hopefuls? The Tokyo-trained Matsuhisa began his career as a restaurateur in Anchorage, Alaska, with an inauspicious start: His seven-week-old restaurant, which had taken him six months to build, burned to the ground. Exhausted and in debt, he moved to Lima, Peru, and ran Matsuei alongside a business partner with whom he eventually parted ways on negative terms. Matsuhisa then spent a year in Buenos Aires, Argentina, but soon learned his mostly seafood menus didn’t resonate with locals more bent on eating beef.

In 1987, he moved to Beverly Hills and opened Matsuhisa, where he quickly caught the eye of celebrity clientele and also received critical acclaim from publications like the New York Times, Zagat, and Food & Wine. Matsuhisa — the restaurant — was the model upon which an empire was built, its menu of sashimi appetizers, sushi rolls, and inventive entrees served in a near-spartan dining room within an equally featureless dark brown building along La Cienega Boulevard.

Two years later, actor Robert De Niro approached the chef to open a restaurant in New York; Matsuhisa initially declined due to his bad partnership experience in Lima. Eventually, after years of convincing, he acquiesced. Matsuhisa and De Niro’s restaurant, which opened as Nobu New York in Tribeca in 1994, grew into a global chain that now spans 56 restaurants (and eight Matsuhisa outlets) across five continents; there are no Nobu restaurants in South America.

Nobu’s traditional Japanese food was based on his training in Tokyo, but it wasn’t until he fused influences from Peru, specifically, using techniques from dishes like ceviche and tiradito (itself a Japanese-influenced sashimi preparation), that his dialed-in approach to Japanese food became a hit. Early in Nobu’s conception process, the chef realized that food could be a cultural force, like fashion and art. He strategically called his cuisine “Nobu-style” to exonerate himself from the strictures of traditional Japanese cuisine, and would later serve to inspire other entrepreneurial chefs.

Many of Nobu’s iconic dishes came from a place of adaptation and greater appeal. Matsuhisa never seemed hellbent on making his customers eat what he made; instead, he changed dishes or recipes so people whose palates were averse to things like raw fish would eventually fall in love. Matsuhisa prided himself in getting picky diners, or those less familiar with Japanese food, to embrace something they’d never tried. In fact, Matsuhisa suggests in Nobu the Cookbook that he’s most happy when customers finish plates of raw fish for the first time. “There is no greater compliment to a chef’s skill than to be able to make a diner enjoy something he or she couldn’t eat before,” Matsuhisa writes. One of his favorite presentations involved pouring hot oil over sashimi to gently cook the fish right on the plate, which he called “new style sashimi.”

Since the 19th century, when colonizing forces subjected Japan to cultural and mercantile exchanges, its food has experienced similar evolution, with Japanese cooks often modifying classic preparations to cater to foreign palates. Ramen and soba noodles were derived from Chinese cuisine; tonkatsu uses French cutlet techniques; tempura comes from Portuguese methods; and so on. Yōshoku, the Japanese name for Western fusion cuisine, includes dishes like curry rice, spaghetti, and fish-and-chip-style chicken nanban. Matsuhisa’s inventions riff off this approach, keenly aware that spicy mayonnaise over crispy shrimp or salty-sweet miso marinade over a luscious broiled black cod could captivate a wider dining audience.

Accommodating the proverbial Western palate hasn’t always been well-received in Japan, but Matsuhisa never saw himself as an arbiter of the cuisine, telling Eater over email: “In the beginning, a lot of people were against it, because Japanese food has a long cultural history. But from the beginning, I never thought of my food as traditional Japanese food. It’s Nobu-style food.” He adds that he saw the use of new ingredients and techniques as a fair pursuit. “All over the world, there are many creative chefs trying [things] their way — so food always changes like fashion, little by little.”

While there are dozens of dishes that Matsuhisa helped popularize, a select few have become indelibly connected to upscale Japanese lounges — a category that has not been formally coined. These restaurants offer a sleek, boisterous, clubby ambience that aids their raison d’être: to see and be seen.

In Los Angeles, especially near West Hollywood and Hollywood, restaurants that fall into the Japanese lounge category include (in no particular order): Koi, Katana, Katsuya, Hamasaku, and Sushi Roku. In New York, Blue Ribbon Sushi, Catch, and Zuma (by way of London) strongly evoke Japanese lounge vibes. Austin’s Uchi — which expanded to Denver, Miami, Scottsdale, and, eventually, West Hollywood — has claimed inspiration from Nobu and Katsuya. Las Vegas’s Yellowtail, Philadelphia’s Morimoto, and Chicago’s Momotaro employ the Nobu formula in one way or another, too.

To a certain kind of diner, these Japanese restaurants represent the ideal way to celebrate or have a good time, fueled by sake and bustling dining rooms pumped with electronic dance music. When, in decades past, a fancy dinner typically meant medium-rare steaks, white tablecloth French fare, or silken Italian pasta, the seal-the-deal type of dinner in the 2020s often comes with starters of glimmering slices of yellowtail jalapeño sashimi drenched in ponzu, an array of crispy sushi rice topped with spicy tuna, glistening popcorn tempura shrimp, and a delicate golden-brown filet of miso-marinated black cod.

The origin stories of the Japanese lounge’s four most iconic dishes, which are represented in restaurants around the world, show that Nobu’s impact has crossed over from early-aughts food culture into the collective appetites of the globally influential and the influenced.

Spicy tuna crispy rice

Nobu’s style of gently modifying dishes to cater to a wider audience yielded creativity among his peers. Chef Katsuya Uechi began branching off of sushi at his Studio City restaurant Katsu-Ya, which opened in 1997, after some customers asked for dishes other than raw fish. One guest, in particular, asked Uechi to prepare something that would make it easier for her to participate in eating sushi. So, he pressed together sushi rice and fried them in oil and butter, resulting in golden cubes of crisp, fat-soaked carbs. Then he took his spicy tuna mixture, typically used in rolls, and placed a perfect mound atop the rice, creating a near-instant icon — the dish is now served in restaurants, Japanese cuisine-based or not, around the world (even the Cheesecake Factory and Erewhon serve it).

Of the four canonical dishes of Japanese lounge restaurants, this is one that Nobu didn’t overtly invent, but it’s so popular that Matsuhisa now serves it regularly at his restaurants. The dish demonstrates that Nobu’s gravitational pull on Japanese cuisine is so powerful it opened up a world in which spicy tuna atop crispy rice could thrive.

Yellowtail jalapeño

A now ubiquitous sashimi course, Matsuhisa says he first made this dish with hamachi as a snack after a charity event. There’s no actual recipe in his cookbook for the yellowtail version, but the notes for the toro with jalapeño reveal the origins of this recipe. His original plan was to make a tiradito, a type of ceviche that doesn’t use any onions and instead leans on rocoto chile paste — a lightly sweet and spicy sauce. The recipe calls for the fish to be dabbed with grated garlic and covered with a yuzu soy sauce. But because Matsuhisa ran out of chile paste, he simply topped the pieces of fish with a slice of fresh jalapeño. Cilantro leaves are added for an herbaceous punch.

Uechi, founder of Los Angeles’s popular — and mimetic — Katsuya restaurants, says he modified Matsuhisa’s recipe with the addition of onion sauce, which gives the dish another aromatic dimension. Rob Lucas, longtime executive chef of Koi in West Hollywood, who trained with Uechi, says he wanted to take the elemental dish a step further. “You don’t ever wanna be exactly like somebody else. I went with a wasabi-soy citrus instead of ponzu,” says the chef, who has Japanese and Polish ancestry. Koi’s version amps up the sashimi with a controversial ingredient: truffle oil. The heady finishing oil gives Koi’s version a straight-from-the-aughts edge.

Uechi’s take, which chef Tyson Cole dubbed “hama chilli,” introduces the more intense spice of bird’s eye chile sitting atop an array of orange supremes, all of it bathed in ponzu. In every edition of yellowtail jalapeño, there’s yellowtail sashimi tinted by fresh chile and tempered by a citrus-soy sauce.

Rock shrimp tempura

Light-as-a-feather and infinitely snackable, rock shrimp tempura is another dish whose apparent origin is Nobu. Though Cajun chef Paul Prudhomme popularized popcorn shrimp in the 1980s, it wasn’t until Matsuhisa doused shrimp tempura with a spicy mayo sauce that it became a global hit in the 1990s. In his cookbook, Matsuhisa says he “jazzed up tempura for my American customers with kuruma shrimp in a creamy spicy sauce.” The cookbook displays the expensive Japanese tiger prawn to the side of that note but concludes the section by mentioning, almost as an afterthought, that the chef sometimes uses rock shrimp instead of kuruma shrimp. Across menus at Nobu, smaller, tender rock shrimp have won the battle against the pricier and harder-to-get kuruma shrimp.

Nobu’s sauce employs rice vinegar as an acid and chile-garlic sauce for heat. A splash of yuzu juice adds a brightness that keeps diners reaching their chopsticks in for another bite. In an official Nobu YouTube video, corporate chef Thomas Buckley explains how the dish became popular as a clear fusion of American and Japanese cooking. “We’re pleasing the Western palate by having a fried dish with a mayonnaise-based sauce. … I’m from England, so it reminds me a little bit of fish and chips,” Buckley says in the video.

Koi’s chef Rob Lucas says rock shrimp tempura’s virality is even simpler to explain: “It’s an easy opener for Americans who love fried food. Tempura has a good flavor that pairs well with creamy mayo.” Uechi says Nobu may have gotten the idea from honey walnut shrimp, a classic Cantonese preparation that uses fried shrimp with mayonnaise.

Miso black cod

While Matsuhisa himself didn’t invent miso-marinated fish — a traditional Japanese preparation — it was his elemental presentation on a white porcelain plate with a pink strand of pickled ginger root and dots of amber-colored saikyo miso that became a foundational part of Nobu-style cuisine. Now the dish, which the chef served with black cod, or technically, sablefish, is synonymous with Japanese lounge restaurants as a staple entree, with numerous stories that chronicle their connection. “This is a favorite of Robert De Niro’s, who often eats it with sake in hand,” Matsuhisa writes in Nobu the Cookbook, citing the actor who had become his partner in every Nobu expansion.

Matsuhisa explains in a YouTube video that he knew the fish from his days in Alaska and realized it wasn’t too expensive to purchase wholesale. “Almost 40 years ago, nobody [knew] black cod in the United States,” the chef says. Matsuhisa tells Eater that when he traveled through South Africa and saw miso black cod on restaurant menus, he “started smiling and feeling good,” recognizing more fully the impact of the dish — and Japanese flavors — all around the world. A buttery, rich fish marinates in the slightly sweet umami paste over three days, an extra depth to its flavor surfacing as it broils. Matsuhisa himself, in the YouTube video, takes credit for black cod’s popularity — and surge in price.

“Back in those [early] days, it was maybe 25 to 30 cents a pound frozen,” he says. “Now the price is more than $15 per pound. Sorry, it’s my fault.”