Product Description

Even for those who have never eaten in one of his restaurants, the name Nobu conjures up a magical world where diners enjoy luxurious food in a chic and glamorous setting.

As one of the most celebrated chefs today, Nobu Matsuhisa is also one of the most international. His ever-expanding worldwide empire of fashionable restaurants now numbers thirteen, and they remain very much the places to eat and to be seen in each city.

His first book, Nobu: The Cookbook, a collection of his favorite seafood recipes, was an international bestseller. Nobu Now presents an exhilarating taste of how Nobu’s repertoire has continued to develop, enriched by his travels and experience in South America, the United States, and Europe, and by the cuisines of the nations in which his restaurants operate. Reflecting a new emphasis on fewer ingredients and a more home-cook-friendly sensibility, the dishes in Nobu Now are more inviting than ever to make.

You will find unique delights such as King Crab White Soufflé and Octopus Carpaccio, with nods to Western haute cuisine in dishes like Baby Turban Shells with Escargot Butter Sauce. A Mediterranean flair is evident in White Fish Somen with Pomodoro Sauce and in Black and Red Rice Risotto. Recipes such as Coriander Soba and Sea Eel “Fish and Chips” give expression to his ingenious brand of fusion cuisine.

For the first time Nobu ventures beyond seafood and shares the exquisite meat and poultry dishes he has crafted, including Kobe Beef New-Style Sashimi and Lamb Chop with Miso Anti-Cucho Sauce. For the vegetarian, there are treats like Fruit Tomato and Vegetable Ceviche, Mushroom Toban Yaki, and Avocado Egg Pudding.

Nobu’s inspired desserts also encompass a broad reach of intriguing flavors and textures. Bamboo Jello and Banana Egg Roll lie alongside Passion Fruit Pasta, while Yuzu Soup with Apricot Ice Cream and Fruit Sake remind us of the basic Japanese sensibility underpinning all his food.

Indeed, the essence of Japanese cuisine—using simple techniques to bring out the flavors in the best of ingredients—is still at the heart of Nobu’s cooking. In Nobu Now he demonstrates how widely and how beautifully this tenet can be applied, resulting in the food that his admirers adore—light, modern, clean, and fresh.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #198014 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-11
• Released on: 2005-10-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Amazon.com Review
Nobu Now, by food master and restaurateur Nobuyuki Matsuhisa, is a challenging book for the cook in this sense: Can you even begin to find these ingredients? And, having found the ingredients, can you decipher the code-written recipes well enough to come anywhere near the picture-perfect results tantalizing you on page after page? You just might be better off booking a reservation into one of the dozen Nobu restaurants scattered about the world and let seasoned professionals ease you in to a world of food that descends from the heart of Japanese fairy tales.

If this isn't a cookbook but a food book come to us mere mortals from the absolute heights of food porn, well, what a delicious book it is. Why take home a copy of the menu from Nobu when you can take home the book and page through so many glorious and exotic food possibilities, Hamo and Foie Gras with Japanese Truffle Sauce, say. "I am proud," Nobu Matsuhisa writes, "that Nobu cuisine remains, beyond any doubt, quintessentially Japanese... as I have explored ingredients in those other countrues, and as I have learnt from their cuisine... this style has acquired a greater simplicity, and has come to display a kind of serenity." Praise must be shared with photographer Eiichi Takahashi who has managed to capture this serenity in stunning photos.

Nobu Matsuhisa is like those few mountaineers who are so far beyond anyone else's skill level that, should they get in trouble on a mountain, there's no one on earth with enough talent to rescue them. Nobu exists in a world of his own making. Nobu Now is the proof in the pudding. --Schuyler Ingle

About the Author
Nobuyuki Matsuhisa was born in Saitama, Japan, and trained as a sushi chef at Matsuei Sushi in Tokyo. After running restaurants in Peru, Argentina, and Alaska, Nobu opened his first restaurant, Matsuhisa, in Beverly Hills in 1987. Six years later, Robert de Niro persuaded him to open Nobu in New York. There are now thirteen Nobu restaurants all over the world—in New York, Los Angeles, Malibu, Aspen, Las Vegas, London, Milan, and Tokyo. He currently lives in Beverly Hills.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Minced Baby White Shrimp Skewers
This ensemble of white shrimp, scallop and fresh aonori laver is served with mayonnaise imbued with the refreshing flavor of fresh wasabi.


Shrimp Skewers
Serves 3

• 2.5 [2 and one-half] ounces raw shrimp

• 1.25 [one and one-quarter] ounces scallops in the shell

• .5 [one-half] ounce fresh aonori

• vegetable oil for deep-frying

• 4.25 [four and one-quarter] ounces mayonnaise

• .75 [three quarters] ounce fresh wasabi

• chives

• 2 sudachi citrus fruits (see "Tips")


1. Remove the heads, shell and tails from the shrimp (prawns); extract the scallops from their shells and remove the beard and innards. Cut the shrimp (prawns) and scallops into fairly small pieces, combining them on the board while chopping.

2. Mix the fresh aonori liver into the shrimp and scallops, and mold the mixture around 6-8 bamboo skewers.

3. Heat the oil for deep-frying to a temperature of 355°F and deep-fry the skewers for 2 minutes. Drain on paper towel.

4. Combine the mayonnaise with the freshly grated wasabi. Spoon this into a small glass pot and sprinkle the chives on top. Serve with the sudachi citrus fruits, cut into thick slices.


Mango Saké
Serves 12

• 1.8 quarts Hokusetsu sake (pure rice)

• 7 ounces sugar syrup

• 10.5 [ten and one-half] ounces mango flesh

• 3 tablespoons and 1 teaspoon mango syrup

• 10 drops ginger juice, squeezed from the root in a garlic press


1. Add a little Japanese sake to the syrup and fresh mango, put into a juicer and blend.

2. Add the mango syrup and ginger juice, then strain through a cloth. Add the remaining sake and store in the fridge.


Tips
This acidic fruit (Citrus sudachi) is a smaller relative of yuzu. It is used in the summer and autumn while still green for its tangy juice and aromatic zest. Sudachi is rarely available outside Japan and lemons can be used as a substitute.

Customer Reviews

More esoteric recipes from Nobu Matsuhisa. Great Pics.
`nobu now' is Nobuyuki Matsuhisa's second cookbook which seems to have all the same virtues of the first, and most of the annoyances of the first as well.

For starters, the book is even more the coffee table ornament than the first, `Nobu: The Cookbook'. The first symptom is the higher than average price for a celebrity chef's cookbook. It lists for $45, almost as much as Thomas Keller's much larger (and much more interesting) `Bouchon'. For this price, it has but 110 recipes and lots of full-page color photographs. I thought it was telling that when Nobu appeared on `The Today Show', the interviewer spent most of their comments salivating over the high photographic quality and saying little about the recipes.

There is no question that the quality of the photography is first rate. Unfortunately, so much space was lavished on the pics, that the book designers made no effort to place the recipes and photos on facing pages in many cases. They even went to the trouble of showing in the table of contents where recipe and pic were not on the same page.

The book is also filled with recipes using lots of hard-to-find ingredients. In comparing high end fish restaurant cookbooks, I find Bob Kinkead's book and Eric Ripert's book on `Le Bernardin' to be much better sources of seafood recipes for the rest of us, even though both have reputations as good or better than nobu for seafood cooking.

I am relieved to find no great litany of celebrity endorsements on this book. I guess Nobu called in all his favors on the first book.

There is no question that this book is really interesting to the professional seafood specialist and even the amateur who likes to create seafood recipes and who has access to a wide variety of fresh seafood ingredients. But, to the average cook who likes seafood, get one of the books mentioned above or even better, Mark Bittman's book, `Fish' or James Peterson's book `Fish and Shellfish'.

I will put in one plug for the last chapter, which is a collection of simple recipes for sauces, salsas, and dressings. For the die-hard foodie, this chapter may be worth the price of the book.

For the coffee table, not your kitchen.
This book has two parts to discover:

1.The "difficult to get proper fresh ingredients" cookbook.

2. The beautiful styled color photographs amply filling half to more often a full page, face to face, well deserving a spot on someone's coffee table.

When you actually look at the required ingredients for each recipe, the majority are not ever going to be cooked by you, unless you can place a request weeks in advance with an insider at an Asian/Japanese market in a very large city.

One can easily make the Banana (and Chocolate) Egg Roll, the whimsical Cherry Jello, and the Mango Pudding from the dessert section. It gets harder obtaining fresh sea urchin eggs, baby turban shells, baby octopus, shiso leaf, pate brique, bayberry, Abalone in the shell, asari clams, Matsutake mushrooms, baby ayu (or other baby fish) and first rate Foie Gras, or Kobe beef, to name a few key ingredients.

I'd like to try the Sea Eel "Fish and Chips" if I could get fresh eel, and cook some of Nobu's other goodies, if I could only get the fresh Ray, mackerel, and tuna cheeks.

I'll pass on the Shark's Fin and Sea Urchin Pudding, or the Shark's Fin with Tuna and Black Bean Sauce.Having seen a dying "finned" shark helpless, upside down on the sandy bottom, with it's fins cut off, left to starve and die over several days unable to swim or eat, this "fin" is not for my cup of soup...and the fin is "just" dried cartilage that is prized mainly for it's expense, and less for "virility enhancement" to impotent Asian men. Let the impotent old guys take an effective Viagra, and let the sharks keep their fins and go on their way. Death by Starvation prolonged for days kills my appetite for this Asian tidbit.

At least he has left out the Japanese Whale meat recipes, and some of the other live-eaten critters that some may desire...I do enjoy eating most everything else.

Yes, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that the books unwritten intent is that you must go, need to go, have to go only to one of Nobu's 13 restaurants, to try these magnificent appearing dishes, as you are not going to create them in your home without mucho work!! You will also realize that these shots are taken as if your eye is inches from the food...and from the photographers' lens...for it never looks this good in the restaurant...however close enough is good for the many who wait for weeks for a Saturday night table at one of his reataurants, to be served by one of his acolytes.

Having done some food styling and photography, I applaud the fine quality, however I've cooked more happily from cookbooks without pictures, when they had ingredients I could collect over even several days before cooking.

I like to cook and eat my own food, more than I like to look at stylized gorgeous photos. That goes even more so for even these beautiful dishes, with scarcely a fleck of Shimchi Togarashi, or even a Ginaan nut appearing even a millimeter out of perfect placement.

I take one point off for this being a high end restaurant coffee table book, rather than one with recipes adapted, or with new "doable" recipes, that a decent level home cook can make at home. Perhaps his next book will have recipes that moderate to advanced home cooks, not living by a superb Asian market, could gather ingredients within a couple days, for a similar beautiful meal. I do look forward to eating at one of his restaurants.

Eye Candy
Nobu's second cookbook is just as beautiful as the first one, and the recipes are just as intimidating (the first is at the same time my favorite cookbook and possibly the one I've used the least recipes from). So only four stars, there are way too many recipes where the ingredients are just impossible to find unless you commute daily from Tokyo to NY. But it does include the recipe for Nobus to-die-for-Miso marinated Black Cod, something that I've eaten twice in one of his resturants and have unsuccessfully been trying to recreate by guesswork alone at home. Magical and uplifting, just like a visit to one of the resturants, but quite expensive - again like a visit.