A luminous portrait of the Japanese chef and his empire

The allure of a subject can take a documentary far. This is the case with Matt Tyrnauer's latest project, Nobua luminous portrait of Nobu Matsuhisa. The Japanese chef is best known for his empire of upscale sushi restaurants (and more recently, hotels), where guests can try his mix of dishes inspired by his Japanese roots and his early forays into Peruvian cuisine. In Nobubased on the memoirs of the same name by Matsuhisa, Tyrnauer (also in Telluride this year with Carville: Winning is everything, stupid.) associates the name of the global phenomenon with a personality.

Nobu is a candid and admiring portrait of its subject. The film will likely appeal to fans of the chef (especially since this year marks the 30th anniversary of the first Nobu restaurant), but it may not completely satiate the culinary curious. Less process-oriented and more wide-ranging than David Gelb's glossy documentary Jiro dreams of sushi, Nobu examines Matsuhisa as a man and as a brand, offering snippets of biography alongside insights into the chef’s ever-growing empire.

Tyrnaeur's Forms Nobu around long interviews with Matsuhisa, who generously recounts his early years growing up in Japan, his desire to become a sushi chef, and the small successes and major failures of his early ventures. These conversations, supplemented by interviews with Matsuhisa’s wife, Yoko, and his two daughters, Junko and Yoshiko, form a relatively candid biography and showcase Matsuhisa’s personality. His humor, characterized by dad jokes and a deadpan delivery, enlivens his narrative and makes the first part of the documentary more intimate. Stories about Matsuhisa’s formative years reveal a childhood marked by early grief and a fascination with making sushi. He compares the process of watching a chef gently press pieces of fish onto rice and serve it to customers to watching an actor on a stage. For Matsuhisa, sushi is not just a cuisine, but a performance.

When the chef talks about the inspiration for popular dishes like black cod miso or his experiments in the kitchen, Nobu approaches its full potential as a documentary. Anecdotes about Matsuhisa’s early years in Peru, where he first encountered cilantro, and restaurant ventures in Anchorage and later Los Angeles confirm the creative thread that sustains his multimillion-dollar business. These moments pepper the portrait with tactical evidence of an artist at work. It’s when we get to witness genius instead of just hearing about it from the film’s various talking heads. A standout sequence comes toward the end of the documentary, when Nobu, in a rare move, decides to host close friends at his home in Japan. Here, the chef’s theories about making sushi as a performance are distilled into action. As he shapes pieces of saltwater eel on a plate, Matsuhisa entertains his guests with jokes and stories about his early culinary days and his more recent days as an international celebrity.

And what a star Matsuhisa has become. Tyrnauer devotes a significant part of Nobu to the business of running a global conglomerate. With dozens of restaurants around the world and a handful of hotels, Nobu is now a luxury good. Tyrnauer travels with the chef, always privately, rarely commercially, to his various restaurants, with a particular focus on Nobu Los Cabos and Nobu London. He also attends board meetings with Matsuhisa and his Nobu cofounders, Robert De Niro and Meir Teper, where the trio negotiate expansion deals and visions for the brand’s future. The direction here is direct, focused more on information transfer than style scoring.

Each of Matsuhisa’s restaurants adheres to Nobu’s modus operandi—intimate luxury, quality food—and also uses local ingredients to reflect cultural appetites. Tyrnauer includes interviews with writers like Ruth Reichl and chefs like Wolfgang Puck to help map the chef’s influence on the culinary world. Some of these threads are introduced and abandoned at a rapid pace, in contrast to the steady pace established in the biographical section.

With so much to tell and such a flattering patina, the documentary mostly avoids areas of potential tension. When the company culture is portrayed as familial, questions about labor practices, including recent lawsuits, are left unanswered. And a moment of disagreement between De Niro and Teper over the direction of the company — expand quickly to seek capital or move slowly to maintain high standards — is observed but not evaluated. It's for this reason that Nobu works best as an introduction, a tasting menu for all things Nobu: the man and the brand.