The Unshakable Serenity of Nobu Matsuhisa
To call Nobu Matsuhisa merely a chef is to ignore the many other aspects inherent to his success. The name Nobu is now synonymous with not only high culinary standards, but luxury itself. It could be argued that his famous black cod miso is as much a status symbol as a Rolex or a Ferrari. Yet, despite it all, he speaks with the grace and humility of a person who still remembers how his mother cooked in their kitchen growing up. He travels up to ten months a year, visiting Nobu locations across five continents, yet insists he is not really a businessman. “Still, I’m chef,” he says, as though it’s the simplest thing in the world, which—of course—it isn’t.
He describes his restaurants, scattered around the globe, as if they are blocks from each other. He is meticulous and holds high standards but says he does not want to impose his will on his chefs. He talks about fusion cuisine not as some wild innovation, but as something that simply came out of a necessity when he moved across the Pacific from Japan to Peru in 1974.
These contradictions are the essence of Matsuhisa: finding joy in the people, team, local ingredients, and work even though, when one is operating on such a scale, it would seem to demand the opposite.
The scale, for the record, consists of 56 restaurants and 18 hotels globally in 30 years, the latest of which just opened in Toronto in all of its two-story, 10,000-square-foot immaculate minimalism. To say that Matsuhisa has built an empire feels correct but also feels somewhat false, as the term “empire” conjures images of ruthless Succession-esque ambition and growth at all costs—none of which seems to apply here. Matsuhisa is a perfectionist, but his approach is deliberate rather than aggressive. He and his partners aren’t actively chasing new locations; instead, they mostly field requests from prospective collaborators eager to bring the Nobu experience to their cities.
To really understand the contradictions, you have to rewind several decades to Saitama, Japan, a quiet commuter town north of Tokyo, where a young boy, devastated by the death of his father at age eight, became entranced watching his mother and grandmother cook. There was something about the way food was prepared that fascinated him. Matsuhisa left school early and got a job in a family-run sushi restaurant. He cleaned and asked every question he could along the way but did not slice fish until he was promoted to sous chef three years later. He soaked it all up. Even today he makes sure to say hello to the dishwashers and busboys as he knows firsthand how important and difficult those jobs are.
Later, a regular client asked him to partner in opening their own restaurant in Peru. He accepted and this is where his cooking entered another world entirely, with ingredients like lemon juice, chili peppers, cilantro, and tomatoes. These were uncommon in his world of cooking at the time, but instead of resisting, he adapted. The result? A culinary breakthrough, though he doesn’t frame it that way because doing so would imply premeditation—and Matsuhisa is not a premeditative guy.
