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FROM NOBU: A MEMOIR (ATRIA/EMILY BESTLER BOOKS, © 2017) 34 By Paul Jebara. T he most copied dish in fine dining is a fish traveling under an alias. Black cod is not cod. It is sablefish, a fat deepwater fish that haunts the cold black of the North Pacific a thousand feet down, revered for centuries in Japan as gindara and dismissed in America as cheap and bony. Nobu Nobu. The Most Imitated Brand in Fine Dining. Matsuhisa began cooking it in Beverly Hills in the late 1980s, when no one else would touch it. He cured it in sweet miso for three days, broiled it until the sugars went to lacquer, and set it before people who had never tasted fish that far north. His black cod conquered a hundred menus; his name, dozens of cities. At 77, Nobu Matsuhisa insists he is still just a cook — and that may be the one thing no one ever copied. The fish was cheap, overlooked, worth more than anyone bothered to notice. So, for years, was the cook. That fish was just Matsuhisa's most famous trick. He'd been pulling it since 1973, when — seven years out of a Tokyo sushi apprenticeship — a Lima kitchen left him without a single Japanese ingredient he trusted. He reached for what Peru had instead, ají and lime and cilantro, and improvised the Japanese-Peruvian cooking that became his signature. "I always look for possibility," he says. "Not famous things. Sometimes people overlook something, but if you have patience, you find its value." The appetite never dulled. Ask him about the best meal of his life and he skips his own kitchens entirely, landing on a Parmesan risotto under white truffle in Milan. "Amazing," he says, still pleased. "The first time." The Lima kitchen almost broke him first. It ended in a fight with his partner; a year in Argentina washed out. Then there was an Anchorage sushi counter — his own at last, every dollar he had sunk into it — that burned to the slab a few weeks after it opened. He landed in Los Angeles with $24 to his name and no good reason to go on. He found one anyway. "I could still A young Chef Nobu at Matsuhisa sushi bar, Beverly Hills Robert De Niro, Chef Nobu, and Meir Teper, 1990s Chef Nobu Matsuhisa Black cod miso Tuna tataki FROM NOBU: A MEMOIR (ATRIA/EMILY BESTLER BOOKS, © 2017)