This weekend Nobu Matsuhisa, the eponymous chef behind the celebrity-favourite restaurant Nobu, will be in London. For a mere £260 you could enjoy a unique dining experience, apparently. I wonder what’s on the menu. Delicious black rhino, perhaps? Or tasty Amur tiger? Maybe some melt-in-the-mouth mountain gorilla?
It’s not as ludicrous as it seems, because Nobu do serve up endangered species in their restaurants. Bluefin (and bigeye) tuna are cheerfully chopped up for sushi and the perky profits of pushing these species to extinction line Matsuhisa’s pockets, and that of his partner in environmental crime, one Robert De Niro.
Nobu have no excuse. They have known this is unacceptable for years. They claim to be leaders in their sector yet they serve up a species that is internationally recognized as endangered, and the only small concession to these concerns is an asterisked qualification on their London menus (it doesn’t happen in any of their other establishments). At the bottom of the menu it says:
Bluefin tuna is an environmentally threatened species. Please ask your server for an alternative.
Seriously. Go have a look. You couldn’t make this stuff up.
I think the wording’s a bit ropey, personally – something along these lines might be an improvement:
Bluefin tuna is an endangered species. Please ask your server why the **** we are still serving it!
The truth is that bluefin is just the tip of Nobu’s environmental problems. They have simply no sustainability policy about sourcing seafood, yet they carry on regardless. In January, a single bluefin tuna sold for £250,000. There is big money in increasingly rare seafood it seems, and Nobu would rather pocket the profits than take any sort of responsibility.
In this regard, they are lagging behind most of the UK supermarkets and even sandwich retailers like Pret A Manger. They are staunchly standing by their principles of avoiding having any principles.
But Nobu evidently isn’t getting the message. So maybe he needs to hear it from a few more people.
He’s here all weekend. Why not tell him what you think of him serving up extinction?
And if anyone at Nobu gives you some crap about how they have an ongoing dialogue with Greenpeace on this issue, feel free to point out that’s just a big fat lie. They know where we are if they do want a dialogue.