She’s so nice — this dish was named twice.
Cindy Crawford is the only celebrity honored with a menu item at the famed sushi hotspot Nobu.
Chef Nobu Matsuhisa affectionately renamed kakiage — a Japanese tempura dish — “Cindy Rice” after the supermodel, who was a regular at Matsuhisa, his first restaurant in Los Angeles, which opened in 1987.
“One day, at lunchtime she came and said, ‘Make me anything,’” the celebrity chef told The Post ahead of the nationwide release of his documentary “Nobu” on July 4.
“I used to do photoshoots in LA all the time, and I wanted Nobu always for lunch, but . . . if I didn’t have a chance to eat right away . . . I wanted something that could maybe sit for one hour or two hours,” she explained in the film, which was directed by Matt Tyrnauer.
Soon after the entree was crowned Cindy Rice, Crawford requested her namesake dish at the New York location of Nobu. The staff was baffled.
“The New York people didn’t know . . . So the manager called me and asked, ‘What’s Cindy Rice?’” Matsuhisa, 76, recalled, laughing.
The famed cook — who got his start as a teen-aged dishwasher and delivery boy in Tokyo — said his first A-list customer was Robert De Niro, even though he didn’t know it then.
The Oscar-winner was so impressed with the food, he approached Matsuhisa about opening a restaurant with him in New York.
“I did not know what he did. Never saw his movies,” Matsuhisa confessed.
The actor is now a partner at Nobu — an empire of 56 restaurants and 45 hotels everywhere from Malibu and Maui to Budapest and the Bahamas. It was De Niro’s idea to name the eatery Nobu.
“He said, ‘Matsuhisa is too long. How about your first name, Nobu?’” Matsuhisa explained. “He’s a great idea man.”
The first Nobu opened in Tribeca in 1994. That location closed in 2017, but there are still two in Manhattan — Nobu Downtown in FiDi and Nobu Fifty Seven in Midtown West.
This year, the brand will be debuting its first hotel in Manhattan — in the Plaza Athenee hotel on the Upper East Side, which closed during the pandemic.
Matsuhisa has since welcomed a who’s who of celeb customers, including Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, David and Victoria Beckham, and Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, who made their debut as a couple by kissing outside its New York location in 2002. (And when they got back together in 2021, their first public smooch was at Nobu Malibu.)
With all his brushes with fame in his nearly 60-year career, Matsuhisa didn’t hesitate to name his favorite customer — Princess Diana, whom he cooked for in Nobu’s London Old Park Lane location in 1997, just months before her death.
“I was really nervous . . . She said to me, ‘Chef Nobu, I read about your history.’ I was so surprised and impressed. And then I cooked for her . . . tempura, black cod. She liked it,” he fondly remembered.
Read the full article here
