Thirty years after launching his namesake chain, Chef Nobu Matsuhisa has no plans to slow down

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Chef Nobuyuki (Nobu) Matsuhisa’s love affair with food began in Saitama, Japan, where, every morning, he watched his mom and grandmother make a traditional breakfast of steamed rice, miso soup, pickled radish and grilled fish.

He loved the way they worked quietly and efficiently together. He was drawn to the un-fussiness of the dishes. And he especially liked how good, and cared for, the food made him and his three siblings feel.

“Some meals stay with you forever,” he says. “I learned, from them, to keep food simple, clean, balanced and tasty.”

His fascination with food has continued, unabated. Now 75, he travels 10 months of the year, checking in on his Nobu outposts (scattered across five continents), where he encourages his teams to experiment with ingredients and come up with new dishes that pay homage to the places in which they are based.

Each new menu item, however, must always pass the Nobu test, ticking those all-important four boxes – simple, clean, balanced and tasty – the template he learned in his mother’s kitchen.

“I am always curious. My education never stops,” says Matsuhisa. “I always tell my teams keep an open mind because sometimes things happen that teach you important things that change your life.”

He shares three examples from early in his own career. The first dates back to the early 1970s, and involves an ill-fated omelette that his wife, Yoko, made when they were first dating.

“She mixed up the salt and the sugar,” he says. “But I tell her, ‘It’s still tasty because you made it with heart.’ From that day on, I always cook with heart.”

The second life-changing event involved a plate of ceviche, served to him by a friend in Lima, Peru. “It was fresh fish, but not at all the Japanese way with soy sauce and wasabi. I had never cooked with chilies, and I had never heard of cilantro. It smelled so strong, at first I can’t even bite. But the ingredients opened my eyes. So, this is now my cooking style, Nobu-style, simple Japanese food with Peruvian influence.”

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The last example is a chance encounter, in 1988, with a famous actor named Robert (Bob) De Niro, who came to his 38-seat restaurant, Matsuhisa, in Beverly Hills. The Oscar winner, a foodie, had heard some buzz about a new Japanese restaurant that served high-quality, really interesting Japanese food. De Niro ordered Matsuhisa’s black cod miso and fell in love. He invited the chef to join him at the table. “I did not know who Bob was. But we got along. I liked him from the start.”

Today, the two men – once dubbed the Godfather and the Codfather by a British newspaper – now sit atop a global luxury hospitality brand that started 30 years ago and now has 54 Nobu restaurants and 18 Nobu hotels.

The eponymous chain – christened “Nobu” by De Niro because it was catchier and easier to say than Matsuhisa, is the Tokyo native’s pride and joy. He lights up like a little kid when we tour his latest property, Nobu Hotel, Restaurant and Residences in Toronto. “I love this space,” says Matsuhisa, pointing to the dining room, designed by Toronto’s Studio Munge, to resemble an Edo-era Japanese courtyard. “It makes me happy to bring elements of my home to new Nobu homes.”

I expect Matsuhisa to be dressed in his customary starched chef whites, but today he’s sporting the latest Sushi Club casual wear (his brand), a white T-shirt and black leather jacket. He looks like someone’s very cool grandpa and, it turns out, he’s exactly that. On his iPhone he proudly shows a photo of his three grandkids. “They are my angels,” says Matsuhisa, who has two daughters.

Then he starts talking about the 30th birthday party he’s hosting next week in Tribeca, N.Y., where the Nobu chain started in the fall of 1994, jumpstarting the global sushi craze. “I still remember opening night like it was yesterday. “Sometimes, from now to the future, maybe seems long ... but the past seems to fly. I’m happy to have lasted 30 years.”

To understand what has pushed Matsuhisa to keep moving, growing and inventing, one only has to look back at his past, which is a fascinating case study in resilience. His childhood was marred by the premature death of his father, who died in a car accident when he was 8. After dropping out of high school (or being kicked out, there are different versions), Matsuhisa began, at 18, to work at a family-run sushi bar in Tokyo. He paid his dues the first two years, cleaning fish, doing dishes and bussing tables.

Gradually he made his way to apprentice chef. Then when he was 23, a Peruvian customer asked him to join him in opening a restaurant in Peru, where he first used ceviche sauce on seafood to make it more delicious. Sadly, that partnership went bust, as did a subsequent one in Argentina.

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In 1977, he tried again, opening a Japanese restaurant in Anchorage, Alaska. That one burned to the ground, taking his life savings with it. “That moment is still emotional to me,” he says. “It was most tough time of my life. I was so scared. I almost tried to kill myself. Life is not always easy and it’s not always fair, but I decided I could not quit for my family.

“Sometimes the worst times teach us the best things. It showed me I had to think positive, rather than negative. It also made me more cautious, more careful.”

That may explain why Matsuhisa waited six years – despite repeated overtures from De Niro – to finally open the first Nobu. He didn’t want to rush into another partnership without being sure it was for the right reasons and with the right people. In retrospect, he thinks the delay was a godsend, allowing him, De Niro and another partner, film producer Meir Teper, to get fully behind the Nobu mantra: serve the highest-quality food with the highest-quality service.

Commitment to excellence is not unique, but being able to maintain fairly consistent high standards over decades, in markets as culturally diverse as Bangkok, Dubai, New Orleans and Rome, is rare. Matt Tyrnauer, whose latest documentary Nobu chronicles how he became a global phenomenon, says the reason Nobu continues to have such cachet is because the man “has such tremendous integrity.

“He’s a perfectionist,” says Tyrnauer. “He never allowed business partners who wanted to economize and force him to compromise on his exacting standards to prevail.

”The integrity of that point of view regarding the food he creates, his comfort in his own skin and his self-confidence earned over decades of setbacks has been a great combination for him. Sometimes out of the chaos comes clarity.”

Matsuhisa knows that longevity is rare in restaurants (roughly 60 per cent fail in the first year) and he credits his company’s staying power to “I never play games.

“I don’t want tricks. Bob, Meir and I discuss this. Sometimes we fight, but we meet face to face, have it out heart to heart and then we understand.”

He also gives credit to his wife, with whom he just celebrated his 50th wedding anniversary. “I would like to say to her, thank you very much. The younger generation says, ‘I love you.’ And then to another person they say, ‘I love you.’ But I still only love her. She is remarkable and I cannot be without her.”

At 75, he has reached an age when most people consider retiring – or at the very least, slowing down. He has no intention of doing either. “There is no reason to stop working. I can still travel. I can still talk. I can still cook. And maybe I can still teach my teams a thing or two,” he says.

“I am here today because of all my experiences – good and bad. I am thankful for everything, and I go to bed happy.”

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