Tropicana Magazine Jan-Feb 2018 #116: A Start From The Heart

THE COOKBOOK
restaurants where he invented some dishes that would
become Nobu staples, including black cod with miso
and soft shell crab sushi rolls. His own restaurant, the
38-seat Matsuhisa in Beverly Hills, followed in 1987.
The great and the good started to come, hungry for his
healthy, simple fish.
A waitress once whispered that Barbra Streisand
was in. Matsuhisa went to say hello, but didn’t know
which woman at the table was the diva. And it was so
busy that Tom Cruise was repeatedly turned down
when he phoned for a table. “ He told his agent, Mike
Ovitz, who is also one of my regular customers, who
called me and said, ‘You really should take Tom
Cruise’s reservations.’ ”
These days, celebrities are shown more love and
reciprocate in kind — check out Jennifer Lawrence
with chopsticks in her mouth, goofing around for the
paparazzi outside Nobu in New York. These days, Nobu
ensures that a house table is kept free for famous walkins
— the Beckhams having dinner in Los Angeles, say,
or Kanye West popping in for lunch in Malibu — but
back then, Madonna sometimes queued for a seat at
Matsuhisa’s sushi counter. “ I didn’t know anybody,” he
shrugs.
That changed, to the point where he could extend
the omakase concept of tailoring food to a customer’s
tastes into the creation of a special Cindy Rice for Cindy
Crawford. This caused problems when she ordered it
in Nobu New York and no one knew how to cook it. “ I
knew Cindy before she married,” he says. “ Now she has
beautiful children and they come [to my restaurants]
without their parents. It makes me very proud that there
is a second generation.”
Another visitor was De Niro. The actor first came
with a regular — Roland Joffé, the director of The Killing
Fields — and although Matsuhisa was unable to put a
name to the famous face, he clocked the excitement in
the restaurant. De Niro often returned when he was
in Los Angeles, and became so enamoured of Nobu’s
black cod and Hokusetsu saké that he asked the chef
to open a restaurant with him in New York. Matsuhisa
visited Tribeca, the down-at-heel neighbourhood that
the actor was intent on developing, but he turned down
the offer and De Niro opened the Tribeca Grill instead.
Four years later, the star asked Matsuhisa to reconsider
his offer — they have been partners since. “ Of course he
is a great actor and the biggest Hollywood star, but we
do business together and I appreciate him because he
understands what I want to do,” Matsuhisa says.
93 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 | TM