Form, Function and Flavor

Nobu’s playful plates lead to some serious eating

I have to admit to having a few reservations about visiting Nobu Waikiki. The fashionable, impeccably designed restaurant in the lobby of the Waikiki Parc Hotel is one of the newest additions to Chef Nobuyuki Matsuhisa’s awesome culinary empire (15 Nobus and counting). For more than a decade, the upscale Nobu has been introducing the beautiful people to Japanese cuisine mixed with European and Latin-American touches.

SOCK IT TO ME: Nobu’s Sockeye Salmon sits in a small pool of olive oil and shoyu and is accompanied by a fiery tomato tempura. photo: Jimmy Forrest

But fusing Japanese tastes and methods with varied cultures and locally sourced ingredients is hardly a novel concept anymore, especially in Hawaii, where even the lowly plate lunch has gone Pac Rim.

My trepidation was probably based on the same feelings of ownership and skepticism I get before viewing a Hollywood movie that is set in Hawaii or when I first saw Tommy Bahama “Hawaiian shirts.” However, I smile every time I watch “Lilo and Stitch” and I now own about a half-dozen Bahama shirts, which I usually wear on special occasions.

It’s the quality, stupid.

We visited Nobu Waikiki early on a Wednesday evening. Our waiter was both genial and well informed. He generously offered to help us build a meal from the menu, but we made it easy for him and ordered the Omakase ($85 and $105), a sort of chef’s tasting menu. We went with the upper-grade option.

Our meal started with a Nobu staple: Toro Tartare, which featured ground-up fatty tuna reshaped into a small cake surrounded by a wasabi soy sauce and topped with caviar. The appetizer was salty, peppery and creamy. It was delicious, but grinding up perfectly good toro negated one of the cut’s greatest attributes – its luscious texture. It seemed akin to chopping up a filet to make a burger. Great, but why?

NOBU WAIKIKI Waikiki Parc Hotel 2233 Helumoa Rd. 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. Open every day 237-6999

That was the only problem I had with texture, or anything else at Nobu, for that matter. If you’re like me, with taste buds that suffer from attention deficit disorder, you’re going to love the Tuna Tataki, which features slices of kampachi and lightly seared ahi in a cool pool of citrus soy dressing. Accompanying the fish was a handful of field greens, which were wrapped in a skin of thinly sliced daikon. Resembling a spring roll, this hand-held salad wasn’t only visually interesting, it had a lot of crunch and a slight bitterness to it, which perfectly complemented and contrasted with the lemony tang of the sauce and the tenderness of the fish. The final touch was a tortilla chiplike wafer made of tiny dried fish, which added a fishy and salty exclamation point to the whole dish.

I’ve eaten at a number of restaurants recently, which try the same creativity on the plate, but after eating the tuna tataki, I realized that those other guys are just playing with their food. Chef Matsuhisa’s forms also have functions.

Inventive combinations of flavors, textures and constructions were the theme of the night. I’m running out room and adjectives to describe the rest of our meal, so I’ll just mention the highlights: The Wagyu Beef was so rare it mooed. It was also so tender and flavorful, I moaned. The Roasted Onaga was cooked perfectly, the skin as crispy as a potato chip and the flesh like butter.

Our meal ended with a dessert that featured strawberry sorbet, strawberries soaked in yuzu, pistachio cream, tofu foam and some other heavenly things. It was light, creamy and clean, tasting like a cloud from a fruity planet.

Quality through and through.

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