In the 1930s a German company called Ernst Letiz Optische Werke produced a small, light camera that used cinematic film to produce what were then considered tiny, tiny negatives but could be taken anywhere and used unobtrusively. Henri Cartier-Bresson, among other photographers, used a Leica almost exclusively, and by the time of his death in 2004 what had been a spectacular feat of engineering had become a legend.
Almost everyone into photography will either have owned a Leica, borrowed one, or wanted one.
But in 2014, 10 years after Cartier-Bresson’s death, the brand had become slightly ridiculous, touting its history and the legend behind it to sell cameras rather than actually innovating. And people who bought Leica were less likely to be commercial photographers than wealthy orthodontists shooting sunsets. Leica had become a brand. Which would not be a problem if the company continued to make great cameras, but it doesn’t.
In 1973 a young Japanese chef moved to Lima, Peru, where he became fascinated with the local ingredients, and either out of bravery or necessity, incorporated them into Japanese cuisine. When he opened Nobu in 1994 in New York he had refined that fusion into an exquisite, daring, imaginative cuisine.
At that time the stiff, starched Lutèce, which served French cuisine, still reigned as the top restaurant in New York (it died, like Cartier-Bresson, in 2004), while younger French chefs
such as Daniel Boulud and Jean-Georges Vongerichten were shaking up the industry and playing with (horrors!) Asian ingredients like lemongrass.
At that time, in the late 1990s, Nobu was amazing. It hit the sweet spot of urbanity with an unexpectedly casual dining room that was full of models and celebrities, thanks to part-ownership by Robert de Niro. The food was new and turned everything you knew on its head, yet managed to feel like it had always been there waiting for you. It’s difficult to remember how iconoclastic and innovative Nobu was at the time, before it became, like Leica, a brand as much as a product.
As of last week, Leica now has a concept store at Greenbelt Mall, while Nobu will open not just a 300-seat restaurant, but an entire Nobu Hotel in the City of Dreams complex in December.
It’ll be the second Nobu Hotel in the world, but the 16th Nobu restaurant in the expanding empire, all of which are owned and operated by the Nobu group (in other words, not a franchise). Who’d have thought that the addition of a smear of chili on raw fish and one signature dish of black cod marinated in miso could spawn an empire worth several millions of dollars?
The other day, Nobu held a press launch as part of the ramp-up to the opening, and I was happy to attend. I’ve been a fan of Nobu since its first branch in TriBeCa, and one of my early dates with my wife when we were dating was the Park Lake Nobu in London.
The food prepared by the Nobu team in an impromptu kitchen is, as I remembered it, devilishly simple as much as it is subtle and compelling. Because it was a press launch we were plied with an abundance of food and alcohol, but there is no doubt in my mind that when Nobu opens it will also be eye-wateringly expensive, as it is in all its locations.
And yet, people continue to go, and the restaurants are wildly successful in all their locations. It’s tempting to decry the Nobu restaurants as an elaborate hoax built on slick marketing,
but the reason the empire thrives and continues to expand is that apart from the celebrity glamor and the merchandising and the name-dropping, the food does deliver. They couldn’t pull this off if at the end of the day they didn’t serve a good meal.
It no longer shocks the way it did in 1994, not because standards have dropped, but other restaurants have caught up, and the food establishment is simply less easily shocked these days.
But I’m still worried about the sheer ambition of the project. If there’s one cuisine that continues to climb to the stratosphere in Manila, it’s Japanese. French and other continental cuisines all peak at about P5,000 per head, at which point you should be plied with enough foie gras and truffles and oysters to roll out of the restaurant like a blancmange. But maybe because we’ve all watched “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” we are willing to pay for Japanese food craftsmanship, for the subtle ways in which the rice melts in the mouth, for unusual ingredients and preparations.
In the cold months, Japanese restaurants can get away with charging over P8,000 a head for exotic ingredients, and probably even more by special arrangement or behind closed doors. With the Nobu imprimatur and their chefs working their magic on the imported ingredients, there should be no shortage of takers, right?
A brand these days is so much more than its etymology, a sign made with a hot iron to identify ownership or provenance. A brand is about making you feel a certain way. So that even if I have only the vaguest idea of what a room at a Nobu Hotel will actually look like, I know it will make me feel sleek and glamorous and cosmopolitan, just like Bobby. Who? Bob is, of course, my friend Robert de Niro; we’re close, you know, I just had lunch in his place.
How far we have come from the moment of either genius or serendipity that led Nobu Matsuhisa to marinate a slice of black cod in miso and grill it with a rich sauce. Estimates put his net worth currently at somewhere around $20 million, which obviously involves a lot more than just serving a whole lot of black cod and sushi.
But at the center of the whole Nobu experience you can still get a very fine meal of black cod and sushi, as well as excellent sashimi and other creations undeservedly unknown. Unlike Leica, Nobu still continues to deliver on its core product.
Nobu and the Nobu Hotel will open at the City of Dreams this coming December.