A documentary called Nobu arrives on Netflix this month, and for a film nominally about the world’s most famous Japanese-Peruvian restaurant empire, it turns out to be surprisingly preoccupied with grief. It is also very well-timed: the brand is mid-sprint across Southeast Asia, with Bangkok already open, Da Nang under active construction, and a District 1 tower in Ho Chi Minh City expected to follow next year.
Director Matt Tyrnauer — the man behind Valentino: The Last Emperor and Studio 54 — brings his signature warm-light treatment to chef Nobuyuki Matsuhisa. The result sits somewhere between authorised biography and something more interesting.
Japanese Cooking That’s Unafraid
There are the predictable beats: the early career in Peru and Alaska, the breakout at Matsuhisa restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles, the moment Robert De Niro — a regular since 1988 — finally convinced the chef to open a New York outpost together in 1994. The name they chose: Nobu. The signatures that followed: black cod marinated in den miso for days, then baked and finished under the broiler. Yellowtail sashimi laid over jalapeño and yuzu soy. Not fusion, Tyrnauer is careful to note — still Japanese cooking, simply unafraid of what grows elsewhere.
De Niro functions in the film less as co-founder than as character witness and occasional enforcer. One scene shows him shooting down a partner’s ideas for new locations with the bluntness of someone who owns the room because he does. The defence of Matsuhisa’s craft against an acquaintance who sneered at a chef who “just chops raw fish” — De Niro’s reply was short and not particularly polite — tells you everything about the dynamic between them.
The Darkness Beneath The Gloss
The film earns its keep in the second half, when Tyrnauer lets the harder material in. Matsuhisa came close to suicide after his Alaska restaurant burned down. He carries a lifelong sense of responsibility for the death of his closest friend. He lost his father young. A colleague suggests his sensitivity to failure is distinctly Japanese in character. That may be true. It is also, clearly, just a man who has been shaped by loss in ways that don’t resolve neatly into a brand story.
What the film does well is suggest a link between that sensitivity and the quality at the centre of his restaurants. The scene where Matsuhisa hauls the Los Cabos hotel staff over for sloppy dish preparation is not the footage of an egotist — it reads as someone genuinely pained by mediocrity. That tension — between the softness of the origin story and the rigour required to run a global operation without it dissolving into themed dining — is where Nobu is most alive.
Bangkok: The Record-Breaker
The film, naturally, says nothing about Southeast Asia. The region is writing its own chapter.
Nobu Bangkok opened on September 20, 2024, with a sake ceremony attended by Matsuhisa and De Niro themselves. The location is not subtle. Spread across the top three floors of The Empire in Bangkok’s Sathorn district — floors 57, 58 and the rooftop — it holds the title of the world’s tallest and largest Nobu restaurant, with 360-degree views of the skyline crowned by a rooftop bar on a helipad. The partnership is with Asset World Corporation, Thailand’s largest integrated lifestyle real estate group.
Designed by Rockwell Group, the restaurant draws on Thailand’s artisanal traditions — hand-woven textiles, wood carving — layered against Japanese calligraphy and the gold-repair philosophy of Kintsugi. The menu sticks to the Nobu canon: yellowtail jalapeño, black cod miso, omakase up to 4,900 baht a head. Whether Bangkok needs another sky-high venue charging those prices is a question the queues outside have largely answered.
Nobu Hospitality and AWC are also developing two hotels in Bangkok — the Plaza Athenee Nobu Hotel and Spa in the restored East Asiatic building on the Chao Phraya riverside, and a second Nobu Hotel adjacent to the Mandarin Oriental, both expected to open in 2026. Thailand, it appears, is not a one-restaurant market for this brand.
Vietnam: The Longer Bet
The Vietnam pipeline is where the scale of the brand’s Southeast Asian ambition becomes clearer.
Nobu Danang will be the first Nobu Residences project in Southeast Asia — a 43-storey tower on the My Khe beachfront, containing 200 guest rooms and 18 suites alongside more than 250 premium residential units. The developer is Viet Capital Real Estate, the same group behind all of Nobu’s Vietnam plays. Alongside the Nobu restaurant, the tower will house a Tsukimidai Sky Bar, a beach club and a range of dining venues. The property has been taking its time — originally announced for 2025, its completion timeline has quietly shifted — but the construction is real and the tower is already one of Danang’s more visible skyline statements.
The second Vietnamese property, Nobu Hotel and Restaurant Ho Chi Minh, is set to open in 2026 as the brand’s 40th hotel globally. The 40-storey mixed-use complex in District 1 will include 135 guest rooms and suites, a rooftop pool, fitness centre, and the Nobu restaurant on the seventh floor, with views of the Saigon River. It is being positioned as a landmark arrival in a city that has been waiting for it.
What The Nobu Documentary Doesn’t Say
Nobu the documentary is, at its core, about a man who needed to leave Japan to become the chef he wanted to be — and who then spent the rest of his career trying to take that journey somewhere reliable and repeatable. The tension in the film is whether that works. The tension in Southeast Asia is the same question, slightly louder.
Bangkok’s Nobu is operating as both the world’s highest venue and, inevitably, something of an Instagram fixture — the rooftop draws as many raised phones as it does serious diners, which is not exactly what the man in the film is worrying about when he checks fish preparation in Los Cabos.
Da Nang is a resort-residential play in a city growing fast enough that the timing might be right. Ho Chi Minh City is the most interesting bet of all: a dense, demanding food market that has long had luxury hotels but hasn’t yet fully committed to the kind of chef-driven fine dining brand that Nobu, at its best, represents.
Whether the restaurants on the 7th and 58th floors of glass towers can preserve whatever it is that made a small sushi counter on La Cienega feel essential — that’s the thing neither Tyrnauer nor Matsuhisa fully answers. But it’s probably the right question.
Nobu is available on Netflix from May 18.
