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make food," he says. "I could still make sushi." That was enough. He started over. He tells all this now without a grain of bitterness — and the gratitude is the surprising part. "So many times, life was up and down," he says. "Every time I hit the wall, people helped me." At 77, he permits himself a sentence he spent decades withholding: "I'm proud of myself. I did it." What he wants now is to talk the young out of their hurry. "People want too much too quickly," he says. "Don't go too fast. Step by step. Even one meter forward, you should be happy. One day, you reach the front." Then Robert De Niro walked in. He spent four years talking Matsuhisa into a New York restaurant; the first Nobu opened in Tribeca in 1994. Today there are more than 70 restaurants and around 40 hotels, open or in development, from Marbella to Melbourne. Texas came early — Nobu Dallas at the Crescent Court in 2005, the first in the state, then Houston's Galleria in 2018. He could coast on any of it. Instead, he turns up in the kitchens, tasting, sending things back, and signs on for more: a first New York hotel, the 145-room Plaza Athénée Nobu & Spa New York, rising in the bones of the shuttered Upper East Side landmark; a barefoot retreat on the pink sands of Barbuda with De Niro and the financier James Packer. Retirement, as he construes it, means more flights. Almost nobody k n e w h i s f a c e . P e o p l e b o o k e d Nobu, ate Nobu, said Nobu, without once picturing the chef who answered to it — until Matt Tyrnauer's 2024 documentary, Nobu, dragged him out from behind his own signage. Now strangers stop him in airport lines and in dining rooms that aren't his. None of it has touched him. Tell him he's a legend, a genius, and he sets the words down like plates he didn't order. "No, no," he says. "I'm still a chef." What he's proudest of is tiny. He still eats in his own rooms with his family, and when the other tables notice him, they come over afterward — never for a photo, only to say thank you. "Those thank- yous are my reward," he says. "People spend money, spend time. They come to the restaurant. Thank you means everything." Then, almost to himself: "I chose a good life." The discipline behind that life is monastic — water after dinner, nothing between meals, exercise and meditation before a breakfast of vegetables and protein — and it serves one purpose. "As people get older, we have to keep healthy," he says. "Because still I have to keep traveling." The restaurants became a phenomenon. The man stayed a cook from Saitama, Japan, who happened to keep showing up. Everything he made got copied — the fish, the miso, the rooms, the name itself, lifted onto menus and marquees he'll never see. The one thing nobody could copy is the part that started it: the humility to stoop for what everyone else stepped over. "Life changes around me," he says. "Myself, never change." Scallop tiradito A young Nobu Matsuhisa working in Los Angeles FROM NOBU: A MEMOIR (ATRIA/EMILY BESTLER BOOKS, © 2017) Chef Nobu DANIELLE LIU A young Chef Nobu at his Peru restaurant FROM NOBU: A MEMOIR (ATRIA/EMILY BESTLER BOOKS, © 2017) 65