Nobu’s next course

LOS ANGELES – Even if you’ve never dined at a Nobu restaurant or stayed at a Nobu-branded hotel, chances are you’ve crossed paths with the brand.

Perhaps you scrolled past paparazzi photos of Taylor Swift exiting the Nobu Downtown in New York’s Tribeca. Maybe you heard the restaurant name-dropped during an episode of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” You’ve possibly sampled a version of the restaurant’s famous black cod with miso, which has been imitated at countless restaurants and in home kitchens around the world.

Since making its debut more than 30 years ago, the Nobu brand has achieved a rare level of both cultural ubiquity and exclusivity — a balancing act that few high-end restaurant chains manage to sustain over decades.

The brand’s most impressive feat to date, however, may be its successful transition from high-end sushi purveyor to luxury hotelier, with its Nobu Hotels arm growing to more than 40 properties open and in the pipeline across the globe in a little over a decade.

It’s a pivot that has caught even seasoned industry professionals by surprise.

“I didn’t even know that Nobu had hotels before I was approached for [my current] role,” said Amir Vahdani, who joined Miami Beach-based Nobu Hospitality as general manager of the Nobu Ryokan Malibu hotel in California three and a half years ago.

Amir Vahdani joined Nobu Hospitality as general manager of the Nobu Ryokan Malibu.

Vahdani, who’d previously had a 19-year stint at Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, was drawn to the Nobu Ryokan Malibu’s more intimate scale. The 16-room property opened in 2017 along Carbon Beach, steps from the bustling Nobu Malibu restaurant next door.

Nowadays, Vahdani is thoroughly versed in the brand’s philosophy, which at the Nobu Ryokan — a smaller, more boutique iteration of the core Nobu Hotels brand — merges Japanese craftsmanship with a laid-back, California-inspired approach to luxury.

“It doesn’t have a lot of the tchotchkes that you find in many rooms — it’s very clean, minimalistic and calming,” said Vahdani, adding that he and his staff aim for “effortless and courteous service” that makes guests “feel comfortable and like they’re coming back home.”

This approach appears to be working well — according to Vahdani, the Nobu Ryokan Malibu has a 50% repeat guest ratio.

And despite Nobu’s association with celebrity culture — with the Malibu restaurant being particularly paparazzi-friendly — Vahdani insists the brand’s endurance stems from something more fundamental.

“People love Nobu in general because of the consistency,” Vahdani said. “You can go to any [Nobu] restaurant and get the same quality and authenticity. It’s all about being true to the brand. We aren’t just a celebrity-driven hospitality group.”

Still, Vahdani said he’s hosted “many, many celebrities” at the Nobu Ryokan Malibu over the years — too many to count. “But as you can imagine, my lips are sealed,” he said.

Hands-on owners

Star power has been woven into Nobu’s fabric from the beginning, courtesy of its famous founders.

The original Nobu restaurant — established by celebrity chef and restaurateur Nobu Matsuhisa, actor Robert De Niro and film producer Meir Teper — opened in Manhattan in 1994 and quickly became a culinary sensation.

But it wasn’t until 2007, amid the opening of a Nobu restaurant on the ground floor of the Hard Rock Hotel San Diego, that inspiration struck again.

“At the time, De Niro was being asked a lot of questions by the press about the Hard Rock, and he started thinking to himself, ‘I’m not here for Hard Rock, I’m here for Nobu,’” recounted Rachael Palumbo, Nobu Hospitality’s senior vice president of global hotel brand marketing. “He started realizing that we have this amazing restaurant that is really being leveraged by these other hotel brands, and so, he encouraged Nobu, who really only knew restaurants, to move into that space.”

In 2009, the founders brought on hotel industry experts Trevor Horwell and Stuart McKenzie — who serve as Nobu Hospitality’s CEO and COO, respectively — to develop the hotel concept, leading to the 2013 opening of the first Nobu Hotel at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. (Before joining Nobu, Horwell and McKenzie had honed their hospitality skills in leadership positions with Hard Rock International and, prior to that, Como Hotels & Resorts.)

According to Palumbo, the group’s first major obstacle was simply “establishing what the hotels were all about.”

“We’re in the luxury lifestyle area, so we’re competing with some major brands in that space,” she said. “It was a challenge just trying to distinguish ourselves in the early days.”

Winning over travel advisors early on proved critical.

Minimalist guestroom at the Nobu Ryokan Malibu

“I was reaching out to travel advisors who I’d worked with in the previous roles, trying to instill confidence in what we’re doing,” Palumbo said. “But I was very encouraged by the travel community. Virtuoso was one of our first big supporters.”

One of the hotel concept’s biggest assets, however, turned out to be what Palumbo described as its “upside-down business model” that puts dining first.

“Not many hotels open first with a restaurant and then with the hotel,” she said. “Usually, you find that celebrity chef and then kind of enhance the hotel with that chef afterward, but with our brand, dining is at the heart of everything we do.”

That’s not to say that Nobu Hotels’ culinary-first approach didn’t present any hurdles. For instance, how would a brand best known for its upscale dinner service handle breakfast?

According to Palumbo, the solution was to develop “Nobu-inspired breakfast dishes” that incorporate Japanese ingredients and techniques into a variety of morning staples. At the Nobu Hotel London Shoreditch, for example, breakfast offerings include a Nobu Style “full English” dish, which includes bacon, Japanese Kurobuta sausage, shiitake, onion confit, cherry tomato, eggs and crispy black pudding, as well as the Matsuhisa Benedict, made with crispy tofu, spinach, snow crab, shiso bearnaise and salmon caviar.

The timing for a culinary-focused hotel brand couldn’t have been better. Nobu Hotels’ debut came just as social media was ushering in a revolutionary new chapter in foodie culture.

“Social media helped [fuel] the whole ‘food porn’ movement,” said Makarand Mody, associate professor of hospitality marketing at the Boston University School of Hospitality Administration. “People began talking about their food and the experiences they have through Instagram and other social media channels, and early movers were able to [leverage that] to maintain an advantage.”

Expanded menu of destinations

Nobu Hotels may have planted its first flag stateside, but the brand’s reach has since expanded across five continents, with properties in destinations as diverse as Ibiza, Spain; Manila, Philippines; Marrakech, Morocco; Santorini, Greece; and Warsaw, Poland.

The group most recently added the Nobu Hotel New Orleans, which opened within the Caesar New Orleans in January, and later his year, Nobu Hotels are slated to open in Rome, Toronto and Khobar, Saudi Arabia. The brand’s extensive pipeline also includes plans for hotels in markets including Bangkok, Lisbon, Tel Aviv, Orlando, New York, Egypt, Barbuda and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with more to come.

The Nobu in Marrakech

How has Nobu Hotels managed to export its distinctive brand of cool across such a wide spectrum of global destinations?

Daniel Langer, founder and CEO of luxury brand strategy firm Equite, credits in part the brand’s “relaxed luxury approach.”

“Given that they were born in a time when luxury dining was a little bit more stiff and formal, they brought an approach that was what I would almost call a bit more human,” said Langer, who also teaches at Pepperdine University in Malibu and has been a Nobu customer for about a decade. “I’ve been to so many Nobu locations all over the world, and typically, I find that the waiters are always quite nice. There’s a relative consistency in their kind of easygoing approach to service.”

Langer added, however, that the Nobu brand also benefits from “special occasion” positioning.

“My daughters, whenever they’re in town, always want to go to Nobu if they want to celebrate with friends,” he said. “They’ve somehow created this brand that seems quite special across the generations.”

And, of course, good food never goes out of style. When Langer dines at a Nobu, he typically requests a “chef’s special” assortment of nigiri and sashimi.

“I’m typically not disappointed,” he said. “The quality of the food is very, very high.”

As Nobu continues to expand, however, Langer predicts that maintaining this consistency and specialness could become increasingly challenging.

“They do have a watch out a little bit,” Langer said. “There are so few brands in today’s world that give you a consistent experience across a number of properties.”

Boston University’s Mody said the brand has “grown sensibly” so far, but he echoed Langer’s warning.

“When you start becoming big, then what made Nobu Nobu could start to get lost,” he said. “And if something’s available everywhere, then you kind of risk losing some of that aspirational nature of the brand.”

But despite Nobu Hospitality’s plans to reach 50 hotels in just the next few years, Palumbo remains confident that the brand’s high standards will endure, thanks to the ongoing involvement of its three founders. She said De Niro, despite his busy filming schedule, remains involved in property decisions and opening events, while Teper continues to focus on the brand’s design and architectural elements.

Matsuhisa, meanwhile, is especially hands-on, traveling 10 months a year to visit Nobu properties and spending time with kitchen and front-of-house staff.

“He walks the talk,” Palumbo said. “He will go to all of our restaurants — some of them more than two or three times a year, but all of them at least once a year. He treats our colleagues like family, and many of our staff members have been with us a minimum of 10 years on the restaurant side, so there’s longevity and loyalty there.”

On the guest side, the Nobu brand has also managed to cultivate a cult status-level of loyalty — despite never implementing the points-based rewards programs that have become standard across much of the luxury and lifestyle hospitality segment.

Mody credits this high level of loyalty to the Nobu brand’s ability to master a delicate balance that very few luxury hospitality players achieve.

“It’s accessible, but it’s not too accessible,” Mody said. “It’s exclusive, but it’s not exclusive in a very exclusionary way. It’s done a lot of things right, and as far as the hotels are concerned, it’ll be interesting to see how they can keep that uniqueness, that exclusivity and that culinary forwardness across [the portfolio] as it grows.”