The secret to Robert De Niro’s hospitality empire
In recent years, celebrity business brands sprout up as fast as they dissolved. But this has not been the case for Oscar-winning actor Robert De Niro, who just celebrated the 25th anniversary of his restaurant and hotel brand Nobu.
The beginning of the business could be traced back to 1988, when De Niro visited Matsuhisa, a Los Angeles restaurant headed by celebrity chef Nobu Matsuhisa.
“The food was amazing,” De Niro recalled to CNN Travel. “Japanese food traditionally in New York and in my experience even in London was very by the book, but it wasn’t what Nobu was doing.”
As he fell further for the food, he reached out to the chef and proposed to help Matsuhisa open a second outpost of the restaurant in Manhattan, New York. Although Matsuhisa rejected his offers, De Niro continued to patronise his business.
Four years later, De Niro called Matsuhisa and put the idea back on the table. “He had been waiting four whole years! My experiences … had made me extremely wary of entering into partnerships with anyone, but his willingness to wait showed me that I could trust him,” Matsuhisa recalled in his book Nobu: A Memoir.
Matsuhisa finally agreed to establish Nobu, an upmarket Japanese-Peruvian fusion restaurant in New York in 1994 with De Niro and two other partners.
Other cities soon followed, including London, Las Vegas, Cape Town, Mexico City and Beijing.
In 2013, they expanded the Nobu brand into the hotel business.
Today, De Niro, Matsuhisa and investor Meir Teper have 39 restaurants and nine hotels across five continents under their name. According to the group, Nobu Hospitality is looking to earn US$1 billion in revenue in the next five years.
Teper said their approach is focused on ensuring customers’ needs are fulfilled.
“Many times, Nobu says that if you had to divide [it up], what is more important, service or food? He would say 60 per cent service, 40 per cent food. Because people remember service,” he said. “We adapted the same philosophy for the hotel.”
“It’s not so easy to be partners for 25 years, but we are close to each other,” said Teper. “We only want to do what is right, in the right location, with the right people.”