NOBU (Tribeca 2025) – Review by Beth Accomando
If you have been watching The Bear, then prepare for a very different behind the scenes look at a chef and his restaurant (or in this case multiple) in Nobu.
The first season of The Bear served up anxiety-inducing tension in Carmy’s Chicago sandwich shop where chaos reins. Nobu Matsuhisa, on the other hand, exudes calm and his restaurants have an unhurried pace so that perfection can inform each piece of sushi. In fact one of the things the film points out is how Nobu redefined dining by allowing the chef to bring out each plate as it is ready for the table rather than forcing the kitchen to scramble to have all the dishes for one table ready at the exact same time.
Nobu reveals that he set his sights on being a sushi chef early in life after he watched a sushi chef prepare each piece of sushi individually. Then he showed his respect by eating the sushi one by one with appreciation. He said that he couldn’t imagine something so delicious even existed and knew right then what he wanted to dedicate his life to making sushi. And the film chronicles the arc of his amazing and spectacular career.
Matt Tyrnauer helms this documentary portrait, which divides its time between tracking Nobu’s personal history with a behind the scenes look at his signature restaurants, Matsuhisa and Nobu as well as his fine dining empire. Tyrnauer shows how experiences in Peru and Alaska shaped Nobu, and how Nobu innovated his own take on Japanese cuisine.
The documentary includes interviews with Nobu’s founding partner Robert De Niro, as well as with celebrated chefs Wolfgang Puck and Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Nobu’s daughter explains that her father had no clue who DeNiro was when the actor first came to the restaurant with an offer to partner on a project. It is fun to see DeNiro’s passion for the work he does with Nobu, it’s a side of the star we don’t often see.
While Nobu’s life and talent as a chef are fascinating, Tyrnauer does not deliver a particularly exciting documentary. It is an elegant-looking talking heads documentary that fails to capture on film the passion Nobu has for his food. I wanted to see more of Nobu preparing food, serving food and eating food. Nobu built the sushi counter in his restaurants as a stage for the sushi chef so why doesn’t Tyrnauer let us see Nobu
perform?
Nobu also explains that he uses only white plates because this is his canvas, so I wanted to see him paint with food. We get hints of all this but the film never finds a way to cinematically capture Nobu’s particular style. Tribeca also hosted the documentary Empire Skate, about skate culture in 1980s and 1990s New York, and that
film found the perfect visual flair to complement its subject.
I love films about food, especially ones that really dig into the obsession someone can have with making a beautiful meal, so top of my list are the fiction films Babette’s Feast and The Taste of Things. The recent documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, about another iconic Japanese sushi chef, gave audiences a much better and more tactile window into the world of sushi making and conveyed more evocatively the world of the chef it was documenting. Nobu is a lovely and tasty film but it feels more like an appetizer that teases something better to come.
