On Iron Chef he wore a purple outfit trimmed with gold in the Japanese style.
In the fall of 1995, Nakamura's predecessor, Rokusaburo Michiba, had fought in the first overtime battle in Kitchen Stadium, a grueling process that led to his retirement at the 1996 Mr. Iron Chef tournament.
During this time, Michiba had repeatedly requested Nakamura to be his successor, but Nakamura repeatedly declined due to two main factors: the first was that, at that time, Michiba's fusion-style Japanese dishes had promoted the stigma among the traditionalist chefs' circle that Iron Chef was to be avoided; the second was that, in contrast to Chen or Hiroyuki Sakai, who owned their own restaurants, Nakamura was a hired chef, and thus had more riding on the line with each battle.
Nakamura is, in stark contrast to Michiba before him and Masaharu Morimoto after, considered to be more of a traditional Japanese chef that was forced to improvise due to unusual-for-traditional-Japanese-cuisine secret ingredients that tended to favor the challenger.
Not surprisingly, his decisions on the dishes he made were often influenced by his bosses at Nadaman, perhaps to maintain a good corporate image although the restaurant itself ceased to care about Nakamura's performance as an Iron Chef after a year.