Riad-side revelry, anyone?
To call the opening ceremony for the latest addition to Nobu’s burgeoning global portfolio ‘a multi-cultural affair’ would be a serious understatement. What we’re witnessing, here, is a crowd of ultra-soigné Europeans, watching the most lauded Hollywood actor of his generation and Japan’s most famous celebrity chef crash open two vast vats of Hokutetsu sake with a mallet, close enough to Marrakech’s Koutoubia Mosque for the 6pm call to prayer having interrupted a traditional Moroccan drum performance five minutes previously.
Robert De Niro, Chef Nobu Matsuhisa and a third member of the Nobu founding trio, film producer Meir Teper (of What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and From Dusk till Dawn fame), are here to celebrate the group’s first ever foray into Africa. The “Kagami Biraki’ (“Opening Of The Mirror”) ceremony has become the default ritual each time a new Nobu Hospitality opens up a new outpost. According to Japanese tradition, the ceremony casts a spell of harmony and good fortune over a new establishment, but this establishment shouldn’t need too much supernatural intervention to become as iconic a jewel in the Moroccan capital’s hospitality crown as La Mamounia – home away from home for a set of notables as diverse as Charlie Chaplin, Francis Ford Coppola and The Beatles – a stone’s throw away.
Set in Marrakech’s luxe Golden Triangle district, just a few minutes’ walk from the Medina and souks, the hotel—whose perfectly circular shape has faint echoes of The Albert Hall or The Colosseum—has 44 Junior Suites, six Deluxe Junior Suites, 18 Deluxe One Bedroom Suites, two Miyabi Suites and The Nobu Suite set over three floors. No matter which you check into, inside you’ll find Nobu’s trademark Japanese minimalism rubbing shoulders with Moroccan artwork and craftsmanship (such as Moorish pattern work on the dark timber wooden wardrobes), and enjoy views of either the Atlas Mountain Range or the aforementioned Mosque, Marrakesh’s biggest.
But Nobu Marrakech’s major talking points are found not on its three storeys of accommodation, but what bookends them vertically. On entering the lobby – which, in part thanks to a self-service station from which chilled bubbly flows as fast as traditional mint tea, is constantly abuzz with fraternising hoards of international clientele – the visitor’s attention is immediately snared by the towering, majestic Bonsai tree around which all the bustle takes place. From here, one passageway leads off to a bar, while the large number of Nobu regulars who stay here for the food will be making a beeline, unpacking and pre-prandial champers complete, for the ground-floor restaurant.
The culinary genius of Chef Nobu—who spent years of studying Japanese cuisine in Tokyo, and plied his trade in Peru and Alaska before becoming acquainted with De Niro in his Japanese seafood restaurant in Beverley Hills in the late 80s – underpins Nobu’s entire epicurean philosophy. Here, diners can savour signature dishes such as Black Cod Miso and Yellowtail Sashimi with Jalapeno, all made using locally sourced flavours and ingredients, and with the application of Chef Nobu’s favoured emphasis on elegant simplicity, (“There are too many chefs trying too hard to do something new,” he tells Robb Report during our visit. “Right now there is too much complication. The Nobu style is simple, clean, good food. There was once a time when Japanese cooking would never involve caviar, truffles, foie gras – there are often too many ingredients now! It’s all too much on the palate.”)
For more casual dining, visitors can head up to the rooftop terrace where, during the day, guests savour sharing plates, sushi bar morsels and salmon-topped pizza (vastly more delicious than it sounds) around a circular, cabana-lined pool circumferencing the building, to a soundtrack of slow-pulse ambient dance music. Stick around for sun-downers and beyond, and you’ll hear the drumbeats rise in frequency and volume, the whole terrace morphing into a party zone – complete with young kaftan-wearing fire chain-swingers, affording the zone echoes of New York’s Studio 54 in its hedonistic late-60s heyday – by around 11pm.
Providing respite from the previous evening’s revelries, once the sun has risen over the Atlas Mountains, is the hotel’s subterranean spa area, a 2,000 m2 space that is as labyrinthine as the souks which sprawl a stone’s throw to the north-east. The 27-metre indoor mosaic pool, with its with hypnotic light projections from locally styled lamps dancing across its bronze tiled walls, has a wonderfully decadent, dare we say harem-like feel. An authentic local Hammam treatment, naturally, is de rigueur.
The Marrakech outlet is one of five new hotels Nobu is adding to its portfolio in 2023, the year of the hotel wing of the brand’s 10th anniversary – the others being in Rome, Atlantic City, San Sebastián and Toronto. Its global portfolio seems to be growing exponentially. Although Teper tells Robb Report that expansion of the brand isn’t necessarily the goal: rather, organic growth, in response to opportunities that happen to arise, is the group’s modus operandi. “We just want to do our best right now,” he says. “When we opened the first Nobu almost 30 years ago we didn’t think ‘What’s the brand going to be 30 years from now?’ All we ever think about is how to make it work right now.”
What Nobu regulars can be assured of is that, whilst the hotel’s Japanese flavours (both culinary and aesthetic) will prevail in any new opening, each will – in deference to its surrounds – be unique. “We have Nobu the way it is, and that’s something to always hold on to: to keep that individuality,” as De Niro tells Robb Report. “Certain things can be uniform—the food being the most important of course.”
The Nobu Suite, which sleeps six guests, is around £2,400 a night
See below for more photos of Nobu, Marrakech
