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Nobu
Nobu opened its original New York location in 1994, founded by chef Nobuyuki "Nobu" Matsuhisa in partnership with actor Robert De Niro and restaurateur Drew Nieporent, built around Matsuhisa's own fusion of traditional Japanese technique with ingredients and flavors he'd picked up while running restaurants in Peru earlier in his career. That fusion approach produced dishes now considered modern classics across the entire sushi and Japanese fine-dining world, most notably black cod with miso and yellowtail sashimi with jalapeño, both dishes that helped define an entire genre of Japanese-Peruvian fusion cuisine that's since been widely imitated by other restaurants worldwide. Nobu expanded from that single New York restaurant into a genuinely global hospitality brand, with dozens of restaurant locations and an associated chain of luxury hotels operating under the Nobu name across multiple continents, making it one of the most commercially successful high-end restaurant brands ever built around a single chef's original culinary vision. Nobu's combination of Matsuhisa's genre-defining Japanese-Peruvian fusion cooking and its subsequent growth into a global restaurant and hotel brand has made it one of the most commercially significant and widely recognized sushi-restaurant names in the entire world, well beyond its original single New York location.
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Masa
Masa opened in 2004 inside New York's Time Warner Center (now the Deutsche Bank Center), founded by chef Masa Takayama, and it quickly became known as one of the most expensive restaurants in the entire United States, with tasting-menu prices that have run into the hundreds of dollars per person for years, driven substantially by the restaurant's insistence on flying in fish directly from Japan's Tsukiji (now Toyosu) fish market. The restaurant earned three Michelin stars and has maintained that rating for years running, one of the longest-held three-star ratings of any restaurant in New York City, reflecting a level of consistency in execution that Michelin inspectors have recognized across repeated visits over more than a decade. Masa's dining room is built around a hinoki cypress wood counter imported directly from Japan, and the restaurant seats only a small number of diners per service, a deliberately intimate format that keeps the chef's personal attention on every single plate served during a given seating rather than delegating to a larger kitchen brigade. Masa's combination of its sustained three-Michelin-star rating, its direct-from-Tsukiji fish sourcing, and its position as one of the most expensive restaurants in the country has made it the reference point for high-end omakase dining in the United States specifically, the American answer to Tokyo's most legendary sushi counters.
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