Nobu, do I rate it?

In short, no. Quite frankly, given what we paid ($90/each) and had been led to expect from an international chain from a celebrity chef, it was sorely lacking. Here's the breakdown.

1. Food. I know Nobu is a fusion between Japanese and Peruvian in an attempt to please the Western palate, but out of the six dishes (+ dessert) we had, we all agreed that we could have gotten the sashimi, salad, vegetarian tempura, and dessert at any old jap cafe at similar quality and much cheaper. I do rate the creamy chili snow crab, the beef special and the cod but it has been pointed out that they weren't exactly ground-breaking. I felt particularly ripped off with my dessert which was described as a chocolate bento. A bento has compartments which are filled with different things. My *bento* had only a chocolate pudding and green tea ice cream. I found it amusing when I just looked up Nobu on wiki and found that the Iron Chef judge rated it a 10/100 for food. This then brings me to....

2. Service. That same judge rated it 90/100 for service. I disagree. I don't know if it was simply different restaurants give different levels of service or the staff took one look at us and thought we wouldn't notice, but for someplace that is supposed to have a bit of cachet, I did not walk out feeling like a princess. No siree, it was no Le Gavroche. Staff had to be waved down, they questioned our ability to order, hell, we even saw them just standing around talking to each other. While no one was flat out rude, sometimes we did get the impression that they questioned our intelligence. Not a good way to treat one doctor, three soon to be doctors, one optom and someone who's job is hush-hush.

3. Decor. Okay, maybe I'm starting to get petty but I would have thought that a high-end jap restaurant would use lacquered chopsticks instead of the disposable bamboo ones in paper wrapper. And the table seemed a bit high. That also brings me back to my bento. I talked to a japanese collegue at work and he said while one compartment boxes are still technically *bento*, he would say that if someone was describing something to him as 'bento', he'd expect five different compartments. Yeah.

So as you can probably tell, I don't rate Nobu. I'd rather spend that $90 to fly to Sydney and eat Menya.