SSome dishes are more memorable than others. In 1988, Robert De Niro met the English director Roland Joffé, with whom he had recently The Missionat a Los Angeles restaurant called Matsuhisa. The restaurant had opened a year earlier and Joffé had become a regular, but it was De Niro’s first visit. The actor ordered black cod miso – a subtle piece of marinated fish garnished with a single strand of pickled ginger root – and drank Japanese sake Hokusetsu.

At that time, there were only a few Japanese restaurants in De Niro’s hometown of New York – the New York Times As recently as 1995, the magazine felt the need to explain to its readers what sushi was – and the fresh taste of this fish on De Niro’s tongue seems like a revelation to him in retrospect. He was immediately hooked. He invited chef Nobuyuki Matsuhisa out of the kitchen for a drink. Matsuhisa, known to his friends as Nobu, had little idea who De Niro was and spoke only broken English, but the two formed a bond. Thirty-six years later, that very plate of cod has spawned a restaurant empire that includes 56 restaurants and 19 hotels on five continents.

Longevity is not the norm in restaurants: 60% go bust in their first year; only a fifth survive five years. When he came to LA, Matsuhisa was well acquainted with that fact. He had trained as a sushi chef in Tokyo and come to the U.S. via failed restaurants in Lima and Buenos Aires, starting with an unlikely venture in Anchorage, Alaska; the restaurant burned down after seven weeks. The huge risk with his Beverly Hills outpost made him hesitant to accept De Niro’s proposal to open a second restaurant in New York. It took six years – and many black cods later – before the actor persuaded him to cross the continent. Their first joint venture, Nobu, opened 30 years ago this month near De Niro’s Tribeca home. Matsuhisa was 45.

At that point, it felt like fate was on their side. Matsuhisa exudes a certain modesty, but he always recognized the great opportunity. Early on, he managed to link his first restaurant with the success of Oscar night. The three-time Oscar nominee Robin Williams dined at Matsuhisa for Hunting for good will in 1988. Roberto Benigni repeated the trick the following year and was so convinced of Nobu’s part in his triumph that he avoided the Oscar parties and returned his statuette to the restaurant to a standing ovation.

Nobu came to New York with this mythology. Timing was a big part of it. The new financial elite of young Wall Street bankers and sports and entertainment stars valued control. They worked hard in the gym. Minimalist opulence was their new aesthetic. They populated lofts in former warehouse districts like Tribeca and were attracted to similarly spartan dining experiences—no French sauces and white tablecloths. They wanted to spend their fortunes while exuding a certain level of edgy asceticism. A perfect plate of yellowtail sashimi with jalapeño shavings fit this generally horrendous offering. Gwyneth Paltrow was an inevitable early Nobu adopter.

When Nobu opened in London’s Old Park Lane in 1997, it took on much of that transatlantic prestige and added a dash of Cool Britannia: Liam Gallagher and Nicole Appleton chose Nobu to announce their relationship to the world; David and Victoria Beckham were the first visitors, as was Diana, Princess of Wales. (In Nobu: the cookbookMatsuhisa recalls their meeting as if it were a haiku sequence: “I remember she was driving a BMW; she came without a single bodyguard. I made her a small meal, vegetable tempura and lobster sashimi.”)

Yet it was Boris Becker who established the first European outpost as a playground for the private jet set. Becker’s name will forever be linked with Nobu for that fateful night in 1999 when, after his final Wimbledon appearance, he ended up in one of the Mayfair restaurant’s broom cupboards with Russian model Angela Ermakova, which resulted in a baby daughter nine months later, a paternity suit and the beginning of his financial downfall. The restaurant was closed in the Evening Standard as “Panties from Nobu”.

Sitting in the vast – and almost empty – bar of London’s third Nobu in Shoreditch on Thursday night, drinking a modest beer and wondering whether a couple of tiny sea bass croquettes (£28) could be a legitimate expense claim, I found myself pondering the question of whether celebrity can ever be a recipe for longevity. The cavernous space, with its restaurant and open kitchen behind it, is in the basement of a Nobu hotel; it feels a little like an homage to pre-financial-crash Britain, with large “industrial” glass doors and elaborately applied graffiti on a terrace and a trip-hop playlist. I wonder who this appeals to. I suppose those for whom the financial crash never happened.

The original Nobu London opened in the fin de siècle era of Terence Conran’s revived Quaglino’s and Oliver Peyton’s palatial art deco Atlantic Bar & Grill, as well as Damien Hirst’s ill-fated Pharmacy. In each case, cool came and went pretty quickly. Not only has Nobu survived and grown, but it also seems to have retained a certain amount of its A-list appeal, at least in its signature locations (in 2015, Atlanta rapper Future collaborated with Drake on a song that repeated the word Nobu for five minutes before ending with the closing line: “I just threw a private dinner in LA”).

When I spoke to him last week about the reasons for the chain’s continued expansion, Andrew Milne, the UK and European operations manager, said the fundamentals of specialty dishes and customer service, as well as an obsessive attention to detail, were key factors. “In a company with high staff turnover, we have people who have been working in London since day one – 27 years,” he says. “Hands-on experience is super important. Meir, Bob and Nobu are involved in everything. Nobu is on the road 10 months a year and when he’s in this part of the world, I travel with him. He works in the kitchen from 9am to 11pm in various places. He’s 75 but never talks about retirement. It’s like, you know, ‘Food is my life. The restaurants are my life. That’s what gives me the most joy.’ That’s not going to change.”

Counterintuitively, the Nobu Group’s ongoing search for a new location is unlikely to change either. To mark the Tribeca restaurant’s 30th anniversary, new Nobu restaurants have opened in Toronto, Forte dei Marmi in Tuscany and New Orleans; Bangkok and Madrid are in the pipeline. Milne insists that growth is organic. “A lot of it comes from long-time guests who may say, ‘Why don’t we do something over there?'” In the meantime, it seems that the most elite of these customers are willing to do anything to fill the gaps in their lives for jumbo shrimp tempura: One journalist who worked for 10 days as a head waiter at both of Nobu’s New York restaurants said the most commonly ordered takeout is delivered by private jet: “We do at least 20 of these orders a month, and even more during busier weeks like spring break,” a colleague told him.

In this way, Matsuhisa has surprised himself by changing many things in 30 years, including the price of fish. When he started, he used black cod in his specialty dish because it was cheap: “Maybe 25 to 30 cents a pound frozen,” he said in a recent video. “Now it’s more than $15 a pound. Sorry – it’s my fault.”