When you’ve been around as long as Nobu, and dealt with as many customers as they have, I’m not surprised that the service standards begin to wane just a little bit. And forget about asking the waiters for water or anything else – they seemed completely disinterested. That said, the service was by far the biggest problem – our meal took approximately 90 minutes to get all of our food, which shouldn’t happen, especially at a restaurant as experienced as Nobu. Though the decor is beautiful, closer inspection shows there is some wear and tear. I was offended that they were charging $20 for something that wasn’t even labelled as “chu-toro” (sushi snob alert).Įven The Atmosphere is dated. Some of you might be offended that they were advertising “Bluefin Tuna”. Seriously – Bluefin Toro was $20 per piece for nigiri. The offerings on the sushi menu are much more standard than you’d expect, which makes the decision to charge so much for nigiri even more ridiculous. That said, it’s hard to go to Nobu without comparing it to other sushi restaurants, and in that regard, Nobu begins to feel dated from a sushi perspective. It’s since been sort of incorporated at high-end sushi restaurants in omakase offering – for example, the next time that you wonder if the blowtorched amberjack is a time-honoured Japanese tradition, think of Nobu’s New Style Sashimi. Not to get all deep, but this is a dish that honours traditional Japanese sushi while still updating it for a more modern flair. It comes with a variety of fish, but the result is the same – pieces of sashimi, covered with oils and spices and flash fried.
The other “signature” sushi dish is Nobu’s “New Style Sashimi” (pictured right). It’s fried rice squares served with a pre-mixed bowl of “spicy tuna”. Spicy Tuna crispy rice is literally everything I hate about Americanized Japanese food. Another delicious non-sushi dish is the squid pasta, mainly because of how unique it is (pictured right).įrom a sushi perspective (and why else would you be here if not for sushi), Nobu has a few signature dishes that aren’t necessarily so traditional. That said, it’s still phenomenal and a must get. Nobu’s most famous dish is their black cod miso (pictured right), which has been duplicated many times over at similar types of restaurants (read: Zuma).
In layman’s terms, there is sushi, as well as cooked fish from South America with Japanese flavors. The food is described by Nobu as being Japanese with peruvian influences. The overall design is very Japanese and very zen, and certainly is eye-catching both when you enter and when you eat Located inside an old bank, the wine cellar has actually been built into what used to be the bank vault. The original though, is far more visually appealing. At one point over the past 20 years, the dinner hours got to be so busy that “Nobu Next Door” was opened two doors down for spillover traffic (I reviewed it here). The New York location of Nobu that I visited happens to be the original. It’s easy to say that Nobu benefited from the rise in popularity of sushi, but I’m not so sure it’s that simple Nobu introduced a generation of foodies to sushi, while still offering more standard high-end menu options that they might have been used to. With 30 restaurants as of 2014, that initial restaurant has certainly been parlayed into a successful restaurant group. It’s first restaurant was opened in 1994, through a partnership between famous restaurantuers, celebrities and Chef Nobu Matsuhisa. It can certainly be argued that Nobu was at the forefront of the sushi craze that has taken over North America (and by extension, the western world).
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