What fun we had with Chef Matsuhisa Nobu at his own restaurant Nobu at the Nobu Hotel in the City of Dreams last week. Chef Nobu visited Manila and I was invited to an exclusive Japanese lunch with him.

The lunch featured some of the Nobu specialties, including the black cod miso. This also happens to be my favourite Nobu specially dish.

COOKING LESSON WITH NOBU

I’d met him several times before. In fact, we have common friends in Tokyo. But this time I just could not pass up the chance to have a delicious lunch as well as to actually watch him in action.

Yes, the famous Chef Nobu Matsuhisa was going to demonstrate how to create some of the iconic dishes served at his Nobu restaurants around the world.

SIMPLE & EASY JAPANESE FOOD

Many great chefs create truly delicious Japanese food. But personally, I believe that the genius of Nobu lies in the fact that he makes everything so simply, and yet also so simply delicious.

For example, he began the demonstration with a dry miso salad. This dish consists basically of five or six ingredients including a lettuce green found in almost every country. So it can be replicated anywhere.

He was so relaxed while demonstrating this dish. But within minutes, we had a perfectly plated dry miso salad in front of us.

CHEF NOBU GIVES ME A SUSHI MAKING LESSON

Then he created a set of sushi. Everyone loves sushi, of course, and it looks deceptively simple to make. After all, sushi is really just sliced fish, with rice, a little vinegar, and some soy sauce. Or so I thought.

Our famous chef certainly made it seem that way.

CHEF NOBU TEACHES ME HOW TO MAKE SUSHI

But then he called out for a participant to help him make sushi. I immediately raised my hand. Of course I wanted to try making sushi with the famous Chef Nobu. In fact, I would be able to learn how to make sushi from the great master himself. Who wouldn’t to do so?

This was when I realised how much harder it is to make sushi than to eat it. Chef Nobu made it seem so easy, but my sushi certainly did not turn out the same way as his.

HOW TO MAKE GOOD SUSHI

In fact, Chef Nobu teased me afterwards: “I think I’ll give you my sushi to eat. But I don’t think I want to eat yours.”

He was right. I was holding a lopsided sushi in my hand. Even I did not want to eat my own sushi.

But guess what? In the end, I decided to eat it anyway. It was delicious. I may not have created a proper sushi in visual terms, but the fish and rice combination were perfect. In fact, it had just the right amount of wasabi and soy sauce. I was really pleased.

So I just may have a sushi career in the future, after all. When I’m done with living a Travelife, that is.

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On Saturday night, in Tokyo living a Travelife, we went for dinner with some friends to a famous sushi place that’s fondly known by long-time residents of Tokyo as the “stock market bubble sushi restaurant.“

It was once the epicentre of success on any weekday night, and every successful fund manager or broker worth his salt had this restaurant on speed dial.

A sign of your prominence, or the fact that you had “arrived,” was your ability to get a good table here at a moment’s notice.

And when you got to this restaurant, you usually had to spend the first five minutes saying hello to everyone, because this is where everyone who wanted glamorous sushi went in this big but small town.

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Just like at the New York Grill of the Park Hyatt Tokyo, which was the other epicentre of success in this town.

We laughed a lot on Saturday night, thinking about the good old days and how sushi restaurants came into the picture.

One guy said, and it’s still true of many non-tourist sushi restaurants these days: “Sushi restaurants peg customers not according to what they ate but according to what they thought you could pay. From our first visit here, we were pegged at 50,000 yen. So no matter what we ate, and how much or how little we ate, we would always be charged around 50,000 yen.”

He added: “So I would tell my guests: eat whatever you wish and as much as you wish, because we’ll get charged 50,000 yen per person anyway, either way.“

The non-tourist sushi restaurants don’t provide you with an itemized bill, you see. Most of the time it’s just a number on a scrap of paper. And if you want to eat there again, you’d be wise not to question how the bill was added up.

Then I added my own observation. I said: “In sushi restaurants run by a husband-and-wife team, you’ll always get a higher bill if it’s the wife who computes it. So what everyone should do is ask the man for the bill when his wife goes into the kitchen to get the miso soup or a fresh pot of tea.”

Our conversations about the good old days lasted late into the night, in Tokyo, living a never-ending, and never-endingly eventful Travelife.

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