Seventeen years is a long time in restaurant years. Long enough for trends to crest and collapse, for dining rooms to date themselves, for cities to change their tastes. Yet Nobu Cape Town enters its 17th year feeling entirely renewed.
Its recent refurbishment does not attempt reinvention. Instead, it refines what was always there, with Nobu’s signature feel drawn closer to its local setting, the One&Only Cape Town at the V&A Waterfront.
Guided by the philosophy of ubuntu and its natural dialogue with Japanese wa (harmony, balance, and respect), the redesign leans into texture and tactility rather than bold statements. It reflects connection through materiality, harmony with nature and a reverence for tradition. The room is lighter now, more open, with the Cape light welcome to move through it by day.
The interiors were conceived by the New York-based Rockwell Group, a long-time collaborator across the Nobu portfolio worldwide. Here, though, the execution is distinctly local. Of the refurbishment budget, 87% was spent in South Africa, with local designers and artisans shaping everything from textile installations to wood panelling. The result has Nobu’s recognisable cadence while feeling grounded in place and at home in the Cape.
Local craft does much of the quiet work. Deconstructed textile pieces by Julia Swanepoel Pepler introduce depth and texture. Handwoven blinds and veneer panels by Sett & Beat textile design studio soften the multi-volume space and temper the grandeur. Along the staircase, a 4-metre milkwood trunk, found washed ashore in Hout Bay, anchors the journey between entrance and dining room, a fragment of South Africa’s coastline preserved within the restaurant’s structure. At the bar, alabaster-shaded lamps diffuse a soft glow that retains the room’s — and indeed Nobu’s — familiar New York-esque composure by night.
This latest chapter unfolds in a story that began three decades ago. Since opening the first Nobu in Tribeca in 1994, chef Nobu Matsuhisa has built one of the most recognisable restaurant brands in contemporary dining. His cooking — rooted in classical Japanese technique and shaped by formative years in Peru — has long since become part of the global culinary vocabulary, with the Cape Town refurbishment proving that, even 30 years on, there is little time for idling.
What distinguishes Nobu, though, is more than his unique use of flavour. It is openness — to the world, to new ideas, and to new audiences — no doubt a product of his time in Peru. Rather than forcing conformity and demanding an unquestioning adherence to tradition, Matsuhisa observed how diners abroad interacted with Japanese food and allowed that behaviour to inform his menu.
The near-infamous spinach salad is a precise example — who knew spinach could taste this good? Rather than adhering strictly to the rigours of Japanese ingredients, the dish leans outward, merging them with widely loved Western flavours: Parmesan and truffle oil sitting alongside yuzu and rice wine vinegar. Baby spinach is lightly dressed, allowing these elements to come into focus, before being finished with deep-fried julienned leeks and a crumble of dehydrated miso (a stroke of genius) that deliver texture and a concentrated umami depth. It reads as simple, but it’s tightly calibrated — a quiet interplay of flavours that feels at once familiar and distinctly its own, Japanese but Italian.
His black cod with miso remains the reference point. It is marinated for days in white miso, sake and mirin until the delicate fish yields with characteristic silkiness and a deeply savoury-meets-sweet flavour profile, and it has gone on to become a signature dish now synonymous with the restaurant group.
The yellowtail sashimi with jalapeño is a prime example of Peruvian cooking’s influence on his menu. The delicate sashimi, layered with near paper-thin slices of jalapeño, continues to deliver its clean interplay of citrus, hea, and raw precision. These dishes have travelled the world, have been replicated and reinterpreted countless times, yet they remain — and, I imagine, always will — distinctly Nobu.
Today, Nobu consists of about 56 restaurants across five continents, complemented by hotels and private residences. The Cape Town address, opened in 2009 at One&Only, is the brand’s only foothold on the continent; a singular outpost that has matured in step with the city’s own dining evolution.
From the March issue of Wanted, 2026
