Nobu sits along the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, with ocean waves lapping under its outdoor deck. It is an interlude of tranquillity along a road that is a maze of construction crews, police cars, fire trucks and the charred frames of beachfront homes — evidence of the wildfires that raced through here earlier this year.
But at 11:45 a.m. on a recent Saturday, the crowd stretched 200-feet deep waiting for Nobu to open for lunch. By 12:30, every table was filled. It was a testament to the endurance and appeal of a restaurant that encapsulates — in food, celebrity and style — a global phenomenon that began 38 years ago, and 20 miles away, when the chef Nobu Matsuhisa opened a modest sushi restaurant in Beverly Hills.
At 76, Matsuhisa today sits atop a restaurant and hotel empire that stretches almost entirely around the globe. He is the chef who, as much as anyone, transformed the sushi scene in New York and, to a lesser extent, Los Angeles. He was one of the first chefs, along with Wolfgang Puck, to have soared beyond the boundaries of his first restaurant to become a celebrity in his own right. And he is now the subject of a new documentary, “Nobu,” tracing the arc of his life, from growing up in a small town outside Tokyo to becoming a magnate with homes in Japan and Bel-Air.
“I am step by step,” Matsuhisa told me. “When I opened my first restaurant in 1987, I never thought about growing. Always I had the passions — always my base was cooking. And now I have so many, we have so many restaurants around the world.”
As Matt Tyrnauer, the filmmaker who spent two years making the documentary, said over plates of sushi at the Nobu in Malibu: “He’s gone from one modest restaurant on La Cienega to becoming a global luxury brand centered on food and hospitality. There are not a lot of people that have pulled that off.”
That Matsuhisa would arrive at this moment — with his 55 restaurants in 24 countries, 45 hotels in 22 countries, and being the subject of a documentary — would have seemed unlikely in 1987, when he landed in Los Angeles after a string of personal failures. The documentary recounts his ill-fated restaurant collaboration on a sushi restaurant in Lima, Peru, where he quit when the owner directed him to use less expensive pieces of fish. His next project, a restaurant in Anchorage, burned down, leaving him with no savings and, as he saw, it no future. “My dreams have been completely broken,” he says in the documentary.
His climb from despair to success was not the result of a grand plan. Rather, as the documentary makes clear, it was persistence and an unconventional approach to the preparation of sushi that draws on the spices and chiles of Peru that distinguished him from the most acclaimed sushi chefs in Japan. And he ended up in Los Angeles at a time when the city was in the midst of its own restaurant revolution, stepping into the faster — and more exciting — lane pioneered by San Francisco and New York, with restaurants like Spago, run by Puck.
“Nobody did what he was doing,” Ruth Reichl, who was the restaurant critic for The Los Angeles Times and later The New York Times, said in an interview. “He went to Peru and discovered new ingredients — and he was like, ‘Why can’t we put this in sushi?’”
“There are a handful of people who have changed the way the world eats,” Reichl says in the documentary. “Nobu is certainly there in that pantheon of game changers.”
“Nobu” traces the irresistible mix of cuisine and celebrity that was such an integral part of the Los Angeles restaurant scene. His first restaurant, called Matsuhisa, became a destination for Hollywood executives, actors and agents. They went for such signature (and still-on-the-menu) dishes as black cod with miso; yellowtail sushi jalapeño; and the new style sashimi, flash fried in olive oil. (He came up with that after one fussy patron informed him in the early days that she would not eat raw fish.)
“I am 76 years old,” Matsuhisa told me. “All my experience, I am — how can I say it — I am so glad I didn’t give up on my life and kept going. I tried to kill myself in Alaska, and I didn’t.”
Madonna, Barbra Streisand and Robert De Niro led the parade of celebrities who began turning up at Matsuhisa. De Niro, who was operating the Tribeca Grill in New York with the restaurateur Drew Nieporent, loved the place. The actor recalled going to the restaurant one night with the British director Roland Joffé. “I said, ‘This is great,’” De Niro told me. “I said to Nobu, ‘If you ever want open a restaurant in New York, let me know.’”
In the documentary, Matsuhisa’s daughter, Yoshiko Matsuhisa-Chapman, said her father did not even know who De Niro was, though the actor suggested that was unlikely. “I’m not sure about that,” he said.
But Nobu’s reputation exploded in New York. “The whole thing about Nobu — I would say in the last 30 years it’s probably the most consequential restaurant that’s been created,” Nieporent said. “We opened in 1994, with humble aspirations — he coming from the West Coast to the East Coast — and we struck lightning.”
In 1995, Reichl, The Times critic, gave Nobu three stars. “He brought the sushi restaurant to New York,” she said in an interview. “He made sushi unique and made it something that everyone wanted to eat.”
The documentary follows Matsuhisa to Peru, Japan, Los Cabos, Mexico, and Las Vegas, and into kitchens where he runs a new generation of chefs through the paces as they replicate his signature dishes. The caviar is piled too high: “Maybe make it more like flat,” he directs a chef. He displays his six steps of assembling sushi by hand, and shows how soy sauce should be applied on a clean white plate in dots, not streaks.
And it explores the tension of expansion and the risks of brand dilution. De Niro objects when one of the Nobu partners, Meir Teper, says the company is considering a Nobu in a Blackstone hotel in Maui. When Teper tells him he has signed off on the deal, De Niro responds: “Well, I’m sorry you did. We have to devote our time to doing projects that are worthy of what we can do and what is expected of us.”
English is Matsuhisa’s second language, and some of the interviews are conducted in Japanese. He is reserved and soft-spoken, and did not weigh in during the dispute between De Niro and Teper. It is almost incidental in this documentary that he was a double-immigrant — Japan to Peru; Peru to the United States — in an era when immigration was not as polarizing an issue as it has become today, particularly in the city he calls home. (And there were benefits: The Spanish he learned during his years in Peru allowed him to communicate with the kitchen workers he hired and supervised, who, in Los Angeles, were overwhelming Latino.)
Yet long ago he grew comfortable with his stature, the worlds he now inhabits. He, too, is a celebrity. In one scene, he settles down to talk to a patron — the model Cindy Crawford — who sings his praises. “You have fed us and our family,” she tells a beaming Matsuhisa.
Puck told me that what distinguished a great chef in today’s world was not only skills in the kitchen, but also, often, business acumen. Matsuhisa, he said, has both. Puck mentioned in passing that when he wanted to celebrate Father’s Day with his family a few weeks ago, he headed back to Matsuhisa.
“I think he is more important than the emperor of Japan for the Japanese community,” he said. “He changed the way people think about Japanese food. He showed it can be fun.”
Adam Nagourney is a Times reporter covering government, political and cultural stories in California, focusing on the effort to rebuild Los Angeles after the fires. He also writes about national politics.
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