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Grant Achatz
Gastón Acurio
Albert Adrià
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Mathias Dahlgren
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Zhenxiang Dong
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Mikel Zeberio
Based in the United States and with a score of restaurants on three continents, Nobuyuki Matsuhisa is the world's most famous Japanese chef, Robert de Niro's partner, favourite chef of film stars and the creator of endlessly-imitated recipes. He is a master chef who shook the foundations of orthodox Japanese cuisine with his hard work and inspiration, daring combinations, perseverance and communication skills.
His story is one of a personal search and a love of basic ingredients. It started out in Japan. As a young child, Nobu lost his father, a scrap merchant, in a motorbike accident. Soon after completing school, he discovered his vocation when his elder brother took him for lunch at a humble sushi bar. "The smell of vinegar". says Matsuhisa, "the way the cook used his knife .... It all seemed magical". So the smallest of the Matsuhisa children decided to become a sushiman. As he explained later, "I wanted to see happy customers as they ate on the other side of the bar". He spent three years as an apprentice in a bar in the Shinjuku market in Tokyo, where his boss took him shopping in the early hours and taught him how to select the best products, all without so much as touching a knife. Then an opportunity came up to travel to Peru and, thinking above all of the strange fish he would see there, he grabbed it.
Nobuyuki and his young wife Yoko adapted perfectly to Peru and, on his daily visits to the market, he soon discovered a whole new spectrum of flavours. "Garlic, coriander, hot chilli peppers, olive oil, exotic fruits... I wanted to offer Japanese cuisine to the locals, so I started experimenting with combinations that would seem familiar to them". And he succeeded. But don't call this fusion cuisine. He dislikes the term. "Although I've adopted elements from other cultures, especially the Latin or European cultures", he states, "my cuisine has always been 99 per cent Japanese. You can call it new Japanese cuisine but never fusion cuisine. I tremble whenever I hear that word". In Matsuey, the restaurant in the aristocratic quarter of San Isidro where he first made his name, they still offer many of his discoveries.
But business did not go well so he left Peru to seek his fortune in such widely differing locations as Argentina and Alaska where, tragically, his restaurant was burnt down, leaving him in debt for over 15 years. Finally, after many ups and downs, he was able to set up his own business, called Matsuhisa, at the heart of Beverly Hills.
When Robert de Niro came to dine for the first time in the late eighties, the busy restaurant on La Cienaga Boulevard was already an institution for members of the Hollywood film business, and Richard Gere and Tom Cruise were regulars. What was his secret? Astonishing dishes such as toro tartar (tuna belly), Nobu-style ceviche, warm sashimi, tuna with Jalapeño peppers, caramelised cod with miso sauce and many other heterodox interpretations of Japanese classics - all light, tasty and surprising but easy to understand, sober but luxurious, simple but exciting.
Legend has it that the Italo-American actor visited Matsuhisa during one of his stays in Los Angeles, liked it so returned, asked to be introduced and eventually proposed that the two of them should join forces and set up a business together on the East Coast. Nobu cautiously declined the offer. But de Niro's determination took the upper hand and by 1994 they had become partners and were resident in South Manhattan.
Soon The New York Times named Nobu as one of the world's top ten chefs, and queues started to form at the door of Hudson Street restaurant. So they had to open up new branches and new business lines. Today the Myriad Restaurant Group has subsidiaries in many cities (Tokyo, Milan, London, Paris, Miami, Las Vegas, etc.), and Matsuhisa is one of the world's most respected (and imitated) cooks. He confesses, "I think cooking depends very little on creation and a lot on the product used. I've been cooking for 36 years and my life is a never-ending love story with fish".
By Juan M. Bellver
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