Matsuhisa Vail

Nobu Matsuhisa is a very famous Japanese chef who owns lots of restaurants. He started with a restaurant in LA called Matsuhisa and then opened the restaurant Nobu in New York. Now there are Nobu and Matsuhisa restaurants all over the world. His classic dishes blend Japanese and Peruvian ingredients. Now lots of restaurants serve similar food, but when Matsuhisa and then Nobu first opened, their type of food was brand new.

We went to Matsuhisa in Vail and I loved it. It was my favorite meal in Vail by far! The restaurant is very big. There is the restaurant itself with many tables, and also a bar, and a traditional sushi counter. The restaurant has a lot of energy and a fun atmosphere. It's noisy in a good way. Whenever the hostesses seat anyone, the chefs call out "Irasshaimase!"which is a traditional Japanese way of welcoming people and telling them to come in.

We started with Yellowtail with Jalepeno, which is one of Matsuhisa's most famous dishes. It's slices of hamachi sashimi, with soy sauce, and you eat each piece with a slice of jalepeno and a piece of cilantro. It was spicy but I loved it.

Yellowtail with Jalepeno

Next we had New Style Sashimi with salmon. New Style Sashimi is another classic Nobu recipe. The fish is served with garlic, ginger, chives, soy and sesame seeds and has hot sesame oil poured over it, which cooks the fish just a little bit. Chef Matsuhisa invented it at his first restaurant, when a customer wouldn't eat raw fish! You can read more about how he created the dish here! https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/12/dining/the-chef-sashimi-that-isn-t-a-star-is-born.html

You can have it made with many kinds of fish, but we chose a Scottish salmon because its fat goes very well with the sesame oil. I thought that the sesame and the chives tasted really good.

After that, we had Black Cod Lettuce Cups. Black Cod with Miso is another one of Nobu's most famous dishes. This version though has smaller pieces of black cod served in lettuce wraps. It has a sweet miso sauce on it and crispy phyllo on top. The adults really liked this dish, but my brother and I didn't. I thought that the sauce was overwhelming in flavor and there was too much of it.

One of my favorite dishes was Mixed Mushrooms Toban-yaki. It was a mix of different kinds of mushrooms and there were so many different types! The mushrooms are cooked with soy and sake and butter and they are very flavorful. This dish is a great example of umami!

I liked the medium sized mushrooms best, and then the ones that look like spaghetti!!

Another one of my favorite dishes was Creamy Spicy Shrimp. It is shrimp tempura that is then tossed with a sauce. The sauce was creamy and spicy, just like the name says. I liked that it had so much flavor.

This Creamy Spicy Shrimp was so good that we had already eaten most of it before we even remembered to take a picture!

We had Wagyu beef that was very delicious. It was served like sushi, on top of rice, which I hadn't had before but I liked. Wagyu means that beef is one of four Japanese breeds of cattle. This was very tender and different from steak that you get at a steak house.

One of my mom's favorite dishes from a long time ago when my parents used to go to Nobu in New York a lot is Squid Pasta with Light Garlic Sauce. What is funny about this dish is that you think it's going to be pasta mixed with squid, but really it's just squid cut into shapes to look like pasta. I didn't like this dish that much because I thought the squid was too chewy. My mom said that she's had better versions of it at other times, but she still liked it.

Doesn't the squid look like it's pasta?!

We had two kinds of plain sushi, buri and kinmedai. Buri is a young yellowtail, and kinmedai is golden eye snapper. The sushi was okay, but it's definitely true that Matsuhisa is a better place to go for cooked and composed dishes than traditional sushi. I preferred the kinmedai, but my parents promised that at a great traditional sushi restaurant, I'd really like the buri too.

The buri is on the left, and the kinmedai is on the right.

For dessert, we got shaved ice, but it was different than any shaved ice I'd seen before. The ice was super smooth and pretty, but just came as a plain pile, with strawberry sauce and sweetened condensed milk on the side. You pour on the sauces, which soak into the ice and flavor it. And then after we dug in, we realized that there was vanilla ice cream with pieces of mint and mochi below. Mochi is a Japanese rice cake made from rice that is pounded into a paste. It is chewy and fun to eat!

I loved Matsuhisa and think it is a great place for people to eat. And it would even be okay for kids who aren't adventurous eaters, because they can always eat rice!