Food and Beverage | De Niro’s Nobu Hospitality aims at USD1 billion in sales

“I’ve done movies here, a festival here and it’s a logical place for us to open.” Robert De Niro

Nobu Hospitality LLC, the sushi restaurant and luxury hotel chain founded by Robert De Niro, chef Nobu Matsuhisa and movie producer Meir Teper, expects to reach USD1 billion in revenue in five years as it adds condos to its growing empire.

A key step in the company’s growth was its first foray into the condo market, with 660 units and 36 luxury-hotel suites atop a Nobu restaurant in Toronto. The project, announced last year, sold out in three months. After starting with one sushi restaurant in New York in 1994, the company now has more than 40 locations, including London and Las Vegas, said Trevor Horwell, chief executive officer of closely held Nobu Hospitality.

“It’s quite a rapid growth,” Horwell said, breaking ground at the Toronto project on Mercer Street, in the city’s entertainment district, Monday. “Normally in our restaurants we can have over 100,000 customers a year. All we’ve got to do is convert 10 to 15 percent of those customers to fill our hotels. So that’s why we went into hotels.”

Nobu Hospitality hopes to complete the two-tower Toronto project, which may cost as much as C$300 million ($231 million), in 30 months, Horwell said. Hotel room rates are expected to be as much as C$800 per night, and condo units will average C$850,000. Most of the condo units were pre-sold to local residents, said Josh Zagdanski, vice president for high rise at Toronto-based developer Madison Group, in an interview.

“I’ve done movies here, a festival here and it’s a logical place for us to open,” said De Niro, who also attended the groundbreaking, complete with gold shovels and Japanese drummers.

The company has committed to two more mixed-use developments, one in Sao Paulo and one in Los Cabos, Mexico, and is on the lookout for opportunities in Asia, including Taipei, Hong Kong and Jakarta. Horwell hopes to have 10 mixed-use Nobu developments around the world in the next decade, while adding five hotels and restaurants per year.

New York is still the dream location for a Nobu-branded mixed-used development, said Horwell, despite an earlier project falling through due to zoning hurdles. “We want to do New York without a doubt, but it has to be special,” he said. “If we did a mixed-use, it’d have to be the best, because there’s some great developments there.”

De Niro is hoping to see a Nobu resort in the coming years, citing the Caribbean island of Barbuda as a possibility. “There’s quite a few things in the works,” he said. Natalie Wong, Bloomberg

Paris bistros seek UN status as ‘intangible cultural’ gem

Owners of the bistros and terrace cafes that are integral to the Paris way of life want the “je ne sais quoi” of their establishments to be recognized as both of global value and endangered.

They have launched a campaign to be named by the United Nations’ cultural agency as an “Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding.” UNESCO has given that status to traditions as varied as a Mongolian camel-coaxing ritual, Iranian sailboat building and the sung prayers of indigenous Peruvians.

Members of a bistro owners association gathered Monday at Le Mesturet in central Paris. With its zinc counter, wooden tables and wine bottles for decoration, it is typical of the kind of establishment people were relaxing outside of when extremists shot at them on Nov. 13, 2015.

The chefs and business owners said the bistros of Paris play a key role in bringing people of all origins, religions, social classes and age together in a cheap and welcoming place to drink coffee or share a meal.

But the traditional bistro also is threatened by increasing rents and competition, and their number has dropped by half in the past 20 years, the owners argued.

“Our most beautiful love and friendship stories were often born in bistros and on terraces,” Le Mesturet owner Alain Fontaine, the association’s president, said.

A visiting tourist “will find a lively place, a place to share with the people of Paris – the people of Paris of today, not the people of the past,” Fontaine added. “A multi-ethnic, inter-faith, socially varied people. All of this disappears inside a bistro.”

The association hopes to see its candidacy examined by UNESCO next year. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo supports the initiative.

Stephanie Mathey, 39, the owner of three bistros in Paris, said she enjoyed taking a coffee in such places even before they became her life work. Her husband grew up in the bar his parents owned.

“Later, he went to the United States for a long time and when he came back, he said, ‘It’s really something that I missed – the bistros,'” Mathey said. The couple eventually decided to open their own.

Alain Fontaine stressed that the “real Parisian bistro” offers homemade food and accessible prices —like a coffee for 1 euro ($1.1) and the days’ special with a glass of wine for 12 euros ($14.)

Fontaine gets emotional when discussing the November 2015 extremist attacks that targeted a concert hall and a soccer stadium as well as cafes, leaving 130 people dead. His ancestors moved from Brussels to Paris in 1784 and he represents the ninth generation living in the same neighborhood.

“I can’t talk about the attacks,” he said, looking at a wooden table his great-grandfather built. “I was hurt because it targeted Parisian ‘art de vivre,'” the way of life.

“We built this over centuries — these terraces and bistros … and I thought about these colorful Parisian youths, from different ethnic and religious backgrounds on these terraces and bistros,” Fontaine said. “These people were targeted. People who were Parisians.”

After the attacks, Parisians rallied to cafes and terraces in a show of defiance. Sylvie Corbet, AP