Nobu Matsuhisa: 'I still look for the next step'

Nobu Matsuhisa marked 30 years of his restaurant group with a one-night tasting inside Nobu Toronto on Thursday, telling guests that the business behind black cod miso and 56 addresses worldwide still has to move like a fashion house, not a hotel chain.

The event, Taste of Nobu, filled the Entertainment District restaurant with live cooking stations, passed canapés and an open bar, a looser format than the usual dinner service, according to NOW Toronto, which covered the evening.

“This I appreciate. I'm so happy to be here like this,” Matsuhisa said, contrasting the relaxed stations with a typical dinner service. “I'm over 70 years old, but I still look for the challenge of trying something new.”

Thirty years in, Nobu's founder still treats every new market like day one.

He compared the business to another industry entirely. “Food business is like fashion,” he said. “So Nobu's food means always looking for the next step.” The line doubles as a mission statement for a group that has grown from one Beverly Hills counter to dozens of restaurants and hotels across five continents.

Matsuhisa said he still does the legwork himself. “Every country, every city, I like to see the fish market and see other restaurants,” he said, adding that he travels nine to ten months a year. Asked to name a favourite dish, he deflected: “It's very difficult... Same question like which kid you like best.” He singled out tiradito, the citrus-cured raw fish dish that bridges his Japanese training and his years in Peru, as his preferred expression of the brand's fusion style.

Nobu Matsuhisa's three decades in business

Matsuhisa, Robert De Niro and producer Meir Teper opened the first restaurant under the Nobu name in New York in September 1994, after Matsuhisa had already built a following at his own Los Angeles counter. Nobu Toronto, inside 25 Mercer Street in the Entertainment District, is the group's 56th location worldwide: 280 seats across two levels in a 10,000-square-foot room designed by Studio Munge, joining a Toronto sushi scene that has filled out fast this year.

Still checking the fish market himself

Matsuhisa gave no date for a next Canadian opening, and Thursday's event was framed as a one-off rather than an expansion announcement. But his own description of the job, chasing the next step, season after season, read as a statement of intent for a brand now three decades past its first dining room.

For Toronto diners, the near-term offer stays simple: the standard menu, plus whatever his next market visit changes on it, in a city whose dining scene picked up its first Michelin stars just last month.