“It’s a flaming dish,” Fred Faucheaux explains, carefully selecting the vegetables: mushrooms, three fine green beans, and a single mini cob of sweetcorn.

I’m inside the gleaming kitchen at Nobu inside One&Only Cape Town, and Fred is preparing the beef toban yaki for me – a traditional Japanese dish served on a piping hot ceramic plate. I’m not exactly sure what he means about flaming, but I’m pretty excited to try it. The restaurant came in at number nine in the 2011 Eat Out DStv Food Network Restaurant Awards, and it’s a rare privilege to get a sneak peek behind the scenes.

Into the pan go the mushrooms: a handful of shiitake, one meaty, curvaceous eryngii, and a clump of the long, thin enokitake. Next, a bright red cut of meat arrives – Chalmar fillet.

“Normally, we would do this on the griller,” explains Fred, removing the mushrooms from the pan and waiting until it’s almost smoking. There’s a hiss and sizzle and the meat is removed, perfectly browned.

Then the ceramic dish is heated and everything goes back into the pan, including the beef, which has been expertly sliced by a sous chef. A few squirts from the battery of sauces – I spot yuzu soy and sake – and suddenly the dish goes up in flames. Fred lets it burn for a few seconds before whipping it off the heat and dropping the ceramic lid over the plate just as the flames are dying down.

“Voila,” says Fred, presenting me with chopsticks and lifting the lid. Inside, the juices are bubbling beneath the simple dish. The beef is so tender it dissolves with one bite and the mushrooms combine with the soy, yuzu and sake to create a rich, nuanced umami flavour. It’s so simple – prepared in a matter of seconds – but the flavours are sublime.

This is the essence of Nobu restaurants: clear, unfussy flavours turned into exquisite dishes. The restaurant is part of the international restaurant dynasty of Nobuyuki Matsuhisa, the Japanese restaurateur who started out in Tokyo, but made his name after opening a restaurant in Peru. While working at Matsuei in Lima, Nobu was forced to improvise, as many of the ingredients he needed were not available. The resulting fusion of Asian and South American ingredients became something of a signature; something that’s still evident in dishes such as Peru’s national dish, the wing rib anticucho (made with the spicy South American chilli sauce, ceviche), and the Nobu tacos, filled with tuna, salmon and a spicy tomato salsa.

Since the early days, the high-end chain has spread around the world, with 25 branches in every city from Milan to Moscow and Beijing to Budapest. Everything, from the recipes to the range of sakes and the plates, is designed by the man himself.

So, what’s it like, heading up one of Matsuhisa’s restaurants? “A big responsibility!” admits Fred. The Frenchman took over as head chef in March, after previous head chef Hideki Maeda left for Nobu London. Fred’s been with the restaurant since it opened, working as a sous chef, but he’s yet to meet the big man as head chef. Is he nervous? Fred nods yes, smiling.

He guides me through the kitchen, letting me inside the walk-in fridges with rows of daikon, edamame, and mushrooms, and the walk-in freezer, which is a nippy –9°, according to the temperature gauge above the door. Then he shows me a chest freezer which can freeze fish at temperatures of –130° to –150°. “That way the fish doesn’t lose its colour.”

Simmering away on one stove is a pot of what looks like stock, with a little muslin bag inside it. This, Fred explains, is the dashi. “It’s like a good chicken stock in French cooking,” says the chef. “You use it as a base for noodles, soup, sauces… everything”.

The accent gives it away: despite the intense knowledge of Asian cookery, it’s a French culinary tradition from which Fred hails. “I’m from a small town in the Loire Valley,” he tells me. “Very small; only about 4000 people.” The chef came to South Africa after meeting his South African wife while working in London. He’s just returned from a month’s leave that was spent with his newborn son.

Behind the sushi counter, I meet Koichiro Kawakami. The Japanese sushi chef is expertly slicing fillets of angelfish, prepping for the evening’s service. Kawakami worked at Nobu restaurants in LA, Moscow and Budapest before coming to Cape Town.

The philosophy behind Nobu sushi? “It’s simple,” he says. It’s a little different to South African sushi: no mayonnaise, no fiddly extras on the top. “Can you eat raw fish?” he asks, handing me a plate of the jalapeño angelfish sashimi to demonstrate. Five slices of pretty pink angelfish lie in a flower shape, each petal dotted with a ring of jalapeno chilli, a few sprigs of coriander and a splash of soy. After tasting it, I think I understand what he means. It’s exquisite in its simplicity: a hint of spice, a hint of coriander, and beautifully fresh.

Want a taste of Nobu for less? This winter the restaurant is offering a six-course tasting menu for only R299 per person. Also on offer is the Winter Bento Box. This double-layered Japanese ‘lunch box’ features a selection of cold appetisers and warm signature dishes from the Nobu kitchen for R275 per person. The Deluxe Winter Bento Box (R375 per person) takes things up a notch and includes an even more indulgent variety of complex signatures from this famed restaurant.

By Katharine Jacobs

Check out more restaurants’ winter specials here. Have you been to Nobu Cape Town? Let us know what you thought.