Nobu Now [Hardcover]

`nobu now' is Nobuyuki Matsuhisa's second cookbook which seems to have all the same virtues of the first, and most of the annoyances of the first as well.

For starters, the book is even more the coffee table ornament than the first, `Nobu: The Cookbook'. The first symptom is the higher than average price for a celebrity chef's cookbook. It lists for $45, almost as much as Thomas Keller's much larger (and much more interesting) `Bouchon'. For this price, it has but 110 recipes and lots of full-page color photographs. I thought it was telling that when Nobu appeared on `The Today Show', the interviewer spent most of their comments salivating over the high photographic quality and saying little about the recipes.

There is no question that the quality of the photography is first rate. Unfortunately, so much space was lavished on the pics, that the book designers made no effort to place the recipes and photos on facing pages in many cases. They even went to the trouble of showing in the table of contents where recipe and pic were not on the same page.

The book is also filled with recipes using lots of hard-to-find ingredients. In comparing high end fish restaurant cookbooks, I find Bob Kinkead's book and Eric Ripert's book on `Le Bernardin' to be much better sources of seafood recipes for the rest of us, even though both have reputations as good or better than nobu for seafood cooking.

I am relieved to find no great litany of celebrity endorsements on this book. I guess Nobu called in all his favors on the first book.

There is no question that this book is really interesting to the professional seafood specialist and even the amateur who likes to create seafood recipes and who has access to a wide variety of fresh seafood ingredients. But, to the average cook who likes seafood, get one of the books mentioned above or even better, Mark Bittman's book, `Fish' or James Peterson's book `Fish and Shellfish'.

I will put in one plug for the last chapter, which is a collection of simple recipes for sauces, salsas, and dressings. For the die-hard foodie, this chapter may be worth the price of the book.

This book has two parts to discover:

1.The "difficult to get proper fresh ingredients" cookbook.

2. The beautiful styled color photographs amply filling half to more often a full page, face to face, well deserving a spot on someone's coffee table.

When you actually look at the required ingredients for each recipe, the majority are not ever going to be cooked by you, unless you can place a request weeks in advance with an insider at an Asian/Japanese market in a very large city.

One can easily make the Banana (and Chocolate) Egg Roll, the whimsical Cherry Jello, and the Mango Pudding from the dessert section. It gets harder obtaining fresh sea urchin eggs, baby turban shells, baby octopus, shiso leaf, pate brique, bayberry, Abalone in the shell, asari clams, Matsutake mushrooms, baby ayu (or other baby fish) and first rate Foie Gras, or Kobe beef, to name a few key ingredients.

I'd like to try the Sea Eel "Fish and Chips" if I could get fresh eel, and cook some of Nobu's other goodies, if I could only get the fresh Ray, mackerel, and tuna cheeks.

I'll pass on the Shark's Fin and Sea Urchin Pudding, or the Shark's Fin with Tuna and Black Bean Sauce.Having seen a dying "finned" shark helpless, upside down on the sandy bottom, with it's fins cut off, left to starve and die over several days unable to swim or eat, this "fin" is not for my cup of soup...and the fin is "just" dried cartilage that is prized mainly for it's expense, and less for "virility enhancement" to impotent Asian men. Let the impotent old guys take an effective Viagra, and let the sharks keep their fins and go on their way. Death by Starvation prolonged for days kills my appetite for this Asian tidbit.

At least he has left out the Japanese Whale meat recipes, and some of the other live-eaten critters that some may desire...I do enjoy eating most everything else.

Yes, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that the books unwritten intent is that you must go, need to go, have to go only to one of Nobu's 13 restaurants, to try these magnificent appearing dishes, as you are not going to create them in your home without mucho work!! You will also realize that these shots are taken as if your eye is inches from the food...and from the photographers' lens...for it never looks this good in the restaurant...however close enough is good for the many who wait for weeks for a Saturday night table at one of his reataurants, to be served by one of his acolytes.

Having done some food styling and photography, I applaud the fine quality, however I've cooked more happily from cookbooks without pictures, when they had ingredients I could collect over even several days before cooking.

I like to cook and eat my own food, more than I like to look at stylized gorgeous photos. That goes even more so for even these beautiful dishes, with scarcely a fleck of Shimchi Togarashi, or even a Ginaan nut appearing even a millimeter out of perfect placement.

I take one point off for this being a high end restaurant coffee table book, rather than one with recipes adapted, or with new "doable" recipes, that a decent level home cook can make at home. Perhaps his next book will have recipes that moderate to advanced home cooks, not living by a superb Asian market, could gather ingredients within a couple days, for a similar beautiful meal. I do look forward to eating at one of his restaurants.

Nobu's second cookbook is just as beautiful as the first one, and the recipes are just as intimidating (the first is at the same time my favorite cookbook and possibly the one I've used the least recipes from). So only four stars, there are way too many recipes where the ingredients are just impossible to find unless you commute daily from Tokyo to NY. But it does include the recipe for Nobus to-die-for-Miso marinated Black Cod, something that I've eaten twice in one of his resturants and have unsuccessfully been trying to recreate by guesswork alone at home. Magical and uplifting, just like a visit to one of the resturants, but quite expensive - again like a visit.

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