I loooove Japanese food and Sandra has been hyping up the London Nobu Restaurants for some time now. Unfortunately the price tag is London at Nobu is pretty scary so when I found out that I was heading to New York Nobu was the first thing I put on my to do list. Therefore to say I’d been looking forward to going Nobu would be an understatement.

Bookings are a necessity at this popular restaurant but are taken only a month in advance so plan well. However once the booking is made flexing the numbers is fairly easy. We finally ended up with a good group size of eight people. I wasn’t sure how ordering at Nobu was going to work with such a large group but it turns out I needn’t have worried – our waiter was excellent and knew exactly how much to order for us.

Nobu Restaurant is all class. We turned up for our booking about half an hour early but they were still able to seat us straight away. As I said before our waiter was just fabulous – he knew exactly what was on the menu and knew exactly about all the ingredients and he was able to give good advice on how to plan our dining experience (including advising us that it was better to leave the sushi to the end so as not to feel too full for the other food.) I was pleased to see that most of his recommendations matched up with what I wanted to order so that worked out very well. We left it up to him to work out how many servings we would need for the dishes we selected and happily he didn’t over order for us which was nice.

We started out with a selection of five cold dishes which were basically varying styles of sashimi – whether it be with jalapenos, dried miso, and hot garlic oils and hot sesame oils. Every piece of fish was supremely fresh and in combination with the “dressings” perfectly balanced. I think even the non-sushi eaters at our table were pleased and enjoyed the selections.

Fresh Yellowtail Sashimi with Jalapeno	Fresh Fluke Sashimi with Dried Miso	Spicy Miso Chips with Tuna

New Style Sashimi (with hot garlic and hot sesame oils)	Sashimi Salad with Matsuhisa Dressing

The cold dishes where then followed by six hot dishes as seen below. My favourite was definitely the Rock Shrimp Tempura and the two dishes with the Wasabi Pepper Sauch though as my brother pointed out we could have done with a bit more of the Wasabi Pepper Sauce and a bit more heat in it. The signature dish – the Miso Black Cod – was also nothing to be complained about. Perfectly cooked and melt in your mouth, with the sauce penetrating to the flesh, the cod was simply divine.

Rock Shrimp Tempura with Ponzu and one with Creamy Spicy Sauce	Squid “Pasta” with Garlic Sauce	Halibut Cheeks with Wasabi Pepper Sauce

Scallops with Pepper Sauce	Chilean Sea Bass with Black Bean Sauce	Broiled Black Cod with Miso

Of course we couldn’t leave the restaurant without trying out some dessert. I actually probably didn’t need the dessert by then as I was absolutely stuffed but hey whilst we were splurging I thought why not!

Pineapple Trio	Fuji Apple Harumaki	Bento Box	Coconut Jasmine Bombe

Overall Nobu definitely lives up to its good reputation. The food was sublime from quality to presentation to taste. Service was impeccable – with our plates being changed between every dish (a bit excessive at times but a nice touch to ensure flavours weren’t mixed) and with our waiters/waitresses being quite efficient and friendly. Surprisingly the entire meal ended up taking over three hours to consume as each dish was brought out one at a time allowing you time in between dishes to digest. The price tag, though high, wasn’t as horrendous as I was expecting it to be at $US800 for the group. Despite not having too many drinks (a couple of alcoholic ones and a couple of non-alcoholic ones) we did have a lot of dishes and was not bad value for money for the quality of the food we got. It was an equisite dining experience that’s for sure and worth it for a special occasion.