Shania Twain's Go-To Restaurant Is An Iconic Japanese Gem

As a seasoned performer who commands the attention of thousands of people on stage, it's no surprise that country music superstar Shania Twain has a food-related ritual before every show. She only drinks liquids on scheduled concert days to avoid burping. On the occasions when she is eating solids, Twain and her family tend to enjoy Mediterranean-style dinners. However, one of her favorite foods is bannock, a Canadian biscuit. When it comes to restaurants, though, she told National Geographic, "If I could eat at one restaurant over and over again, it'd be Nobu."

Chef Nobuyuki "Nobu" Matsuhisa opened the first Nobu restaurant in New York in 1994 with co=owners actor Robert De Niro and movie producer Meir Teper. Masaharu Morimoto also became the head chef that year. Since then, Nobu has become a worldwide phenomenon. The restaurants have served numerous celebrities in addition to Shania Twain, including Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez, Kendall Jenner, Leonardo DiCaprio, Taylor Swift, and David and Victoria Beckham.

However, the star customers aren't the reason Nobu is an iconic culinary gem. That honor goes to the restaurant's Nikkei cuisine, a fusion of Peruvian flavors and ingredients with Japanese techniques, and to the love put into each dish. As chef Matsuhisa told Food & Wine, "Everyone can copy my recipes, but nobody can copy my heart."

Chef Nobu Matsuhisa takes a unique approach to his menu design and cooking. Rather than make his patrons eat whatever he chooses to create, he adapts dishes to patrons' palates. His goal was to change his recipes so that people would fall in love with foods that they thought they would never eat. In "Nobu: The Cookbook," the chef writes, "There is no greater compliment to a chef's skills than to be able to make a diner enjoy something he or she couldn't eat before."

Some of Nobu's most popular dishes include spicy tuna crispy rice, yellowtail jalapeño, rock shrimp tempura, and miso black cod. The latter uses a Japanese preparation of marinating fish in miso, and it's so popular that a miso-marinated black cod kit that comes with garlic rice is a Costco seafood option people claim is a Nobu copycat.

One of Shania Twain's favorites is a global favorite, too. "The butter leaf lettuce salad is so good, you can't imagine! My favorite thing to eat on the side is yuba — it's a raw, very delicate soy curd and they serve it in various ways. It's so good I could live on that," she tells National Geographic.

The butter lettuce salad is made with dried miso, syrup-soaked baked pecans, freshly grated parmesan, and an  aioli dressing blended with tofu, olive oil, and the juice of a Japanese citrus fruit called yuzu. Nobu is no stranger to combining favorites, too, such as the black cod butter lettuce, which features a bed of butter lettuce with miso-marinated black cod and a crispy filo topping.