Nobu Hotel Chicago

Robert De Niro and chef Nobu Matsuhisa's hospitality group built an eleven-story hotel from scratch on West Loop's Restaurant Row, four years after breaking ground. It opened in July 2020 with 115 rooms, a ground-floor Nobu restaurant, and an eleventh-floor rooftop bar that has become the more talked-about half of the property.

The place

The hotel sits on the 800 block of West Randolph Street, the corridor West Loop locals call Restaurant Row, where a former meatpacking district has become one of the most competitive dining strips in Chicago. Fulton Market's gallery-and-office boom is a five-minute walk north; the Loop's financial towers show up in the skyline view from the rooftop to the east.

The concept

Nobu Hotel Chicago is a rarity for the Nobu Hospitality portfolio, which has generally taken over existing landmark buildings elsewhere: London's Nobu Hotel Shoreditch among them. Here, developer Centaur worked with Modif Architecture and local interior firm Studio K to build new, breaking ground in 2016 on what co-owner Robert De Niro called, at the ceremony, the harder but more satisfying route: starting from scratch rather than adapting an old building. The eleven-story tower took four years to reach opening day, delivering 115 rooms and suites over a base organized around a ground-floor restaurant and an eleventh-floor rooftop, with interiors leaning on Japanese joinery references (dark timber, stone, custom millwork) inside a comparatively restrained glass-and-metal shell.

The hotel opened on July 1, 2020, in the middle of the first pandemic summer, under capacity restrictions that muted what should have been one of the year's bigger Chicago debuts; the restaurant itself didn't open until nearly three months later, in late September. The staggered rollout blunted the launch, but it also meant Nobu arrived on a street where the restaurant, not the hotel, was always going to be the draw.

Dining & wellness

The ground floor holds the signature Nobu restaurant and sushi bar, running chef Nobu Matsuhisa's familiar repertoire (black cod miso, yellowtail sashimi, rock shrimp tempura) with an indoor-outdoor bar and patio seating onto Randolph Street. On the eleventh floor, The Rooftop at Nobu is a separate reservation entirely: an open-air lounge with imported sakes and skyline views over Restaurant Row, and by most opening-week accounts the part of the property that actually pulls in West Loop regulars who aren't staying the night. The hotel rounds out with an indoor pool, spa treatment rooms, and a fitness center: modest by luxury-hotel standards, in keeping with a build organized around its restaurant and rooftop rather than its amenity deck.