His Restaurant Burned Down in Peru. He Moved to Alaska. Then He Built the Most Recognisable Japanese Restaurant Brand on Earth.

Lima, Peru. 1976.

Nobu Matsuhisa had just opened his first restaurant

He was twenty-eight years old. He had trained for years in Tokyo before being recruited to open a Japanese restaurant in Lima. He had moved to Peru for the opportunity -leaving Japan, crossing the world, arriving in South America to cook Japanese food for a city that had never quite encountered it before.

He also encountered something he had not expected: Peruvian ingredients.

The seafood was different. The chillies were extraordinary. The local produce had flavours that Japanese cooking did not use and had never combined with. He could not always get Japanese ingredients in Lima -supply chains in the 1970s were not forgiving -so he started substituting. He used what was available. He cooked with leche de tigre. He worked with ají amarillo. He discovered that the acid of Peruvian citrus transformed raw fish in ways that Japanese technique understood deeply.

He was building a cuisine without knowing it.

Then the restaurant burned down.

He lost everything.

The fire took the building, the kitchen, the investment, the plan. He has said it was the darkest period of his life. He was in a foreign country, he had failed, he had nothing to show for the years of work, and he did not know how to go forward.

He went to Alaska.

A Japanese friend offered him a partnership in a restaurant in Anchorage. He went because he had no better option. Alaska in the 1970s was not a culinary destination. But it was work, and work was what he needed.

Alaska did not work either. That partnership dissolved. He was now twice displaced -first Lima, then Anchorage. He moved to Los Angeles with his family. He took jobs in Japanese restaurants in the city, working other people's kitchens, saving slowly, rebuilding from the most basic position possible.

In 1987, he opened Matsuhisa in Beverly Hills.

He cooked the food that his displacement had taught him -Japanese technique fused with the South American ingredients that Lima had given him. It was not a calculated fusion concept. It was the honest record of everywhere he had been and everything the world had offered him when he arrived with nothing. The usuzukuri. The black cod with miso. The tiradito. Dishes that existed nowhere before him because no one before him had been displaced in exactly the way he had been displaced.

Los Angeles noticed.

Robert De Niro ate at Matsuhisa and asked Nobu to open a restaurant in New York with him as a partner. In 1994, Nobu New York opened in Tribeca. The food world changed. The restaurant was booked months in advance from its first week. Reviewers ran out of superlatives.

Today, Nobu is one of the most recognised restaurant brands in the world. Hotels. Restaurants on six continents. Las Vegas, London, Tokyo, Dubai, Cape Town, São Paulo, Miami. The Nobu brand has expanded into luxury hotels -Nobu Hotel Malibu, Nobu Hotel London, Nobu Hotel Chicago. Robert De Niro is still his partner. The black cod with miso is still on every menu.

It began with a fire in Lima that took everything he had.

The displacement was not the obstacle.

It was the recipe.

May the day break!