At these new Nobus, Mr. Matsuhisa’s food was still a major event, but not necessarily the main event. And the question was not just whether you felt like eating at Nobu but whether you felt like being at Nobu. The Malibu location in particular has a reputation for intense good-time vibes that can drive away customers who merely want to eat.

All this was encapsulated for me in two brief scenes from my recent meals at Nobu Downtown and Nobu Fifty Seven. The first episode took place while I was sitting at the sushi bar of Nobu Downtown. This location, inside the old AT&T tower on Lower Broadway, is theoretically the successor to the first Nobu; it opened last year a few weeks after the original closed. The sushi bar was the heart of the TriBeCa restaurant. The chefs behind it prepared or touched at least half the food, and seats there were so coveted that during the 1990s, when even celebrities complained about how hard it was to get in, a mostly sushi restaurant called Next Door Nobu was opened simply to contain the overflow. (It closed last year, too, and won’t be replaced.)

At Nobu Downtown, the upstairs sushi counter is on the far side of the cocktail bar that the design firm Rockwell Group slipped in among the enormous fluted limestone columns that fill the building’s ground floor like a petrified forest. I had just eaten a piece of Japanese scallop sushi with a dangerous streak of wasabi when an animated group of four new arrivals appeared next to me. The sushi chefs eyed them warily, because they appeared to intend to cluster around a single stool, the way people do at a bar. Soon it became apparent that they thought they were at the bar. But the people they mistook for bartenders were all busy slicing raw fish, so eventually the group moved on to look for somebody to make them a drink.

Moments like this didn’t tend to happen at the original Nobu, but they do bring Nobu Downtown in line with Nobu Fifty Seven. In business on 57th Street since 2005, Nobu Fifty Seven is another two-story proposition. Between 5 and 7 p.m. its ground-floor lounge acts on young Midtown professionals like the fishing nets evoked by Rockwell Group’s design. At the time the second scene took place, the bartenders looked as if they were struggling not to get caught. My cocktail, a Negroni-esque thing with sake in it that was ferried to my upstairs table from the downstairs bar, was neither shaken nor stirred; it was, in fact, almost hot.

While I was waiting for the cocktail to be cooled by its single ice cube, a server was struggling to open a bottle of Champagne for a table of at least 10 men next to me. When the cork came out, he managed to spray the room in a manner usually seen in the Super Bowl champions’ locker room. Everybody nearby got a little wet, including me and my guests, but nobody seemed to notice.