Shohei Takamatsu died on April 26, 2026, just over a week before his 95th birthday, and the obituaries that followed described him correctly as a pioneer of Japanese cuisine in Dallas. What they couldn’t fully capture is the specific weight of that word in this context — what it actually meant, in practical terms, to open a serious Japanese restaurant in Dallas in 1973, and what grew from the seed he planted over the next three decades.
Royal Tokyo opened on North Greenville Avenue in the early 1970s in a building that announced itself before you walked through the door. Elaborate Japanese gardens, bonsai trees, a waterfall, koi ponds — the kind of setting that told you immediately this was not a hibachi restaurant, not a Chinese restaurant with Japanese items on the menu, not a shortcut. Takamatsu had come from Japan carrying recipes and cultural knowledge that Dallas had never encountered, and he ran the kitchen with the understanding that the food was an expression of a civilization, not a novelty act. The room served shabu-shabu — the Japanese hot pot of paper-thin beef and vegetables cooked tableside in a delicate broth — when most Dallas diners had never heard the word. Udon noodles, properly made. Green tea ice cream, which Royal Tokyo brought to Dallas before anywhere else in the city. And eventually, in 1980, one of the first sushi bars Dallas had ever seen.
The sushi bar is where the story becomes a genealogy. In 1989, a young Japanese chef named Teiichi Sakurai arrived at Royal Tokyo after working at a hibachi restaurant in Amarillo and took a job behind the sushi counter. He found a menu of modest scope — salmon, shrimp, tuna, the essentials — and spent the next several years expanding it item by item, reading the room, testing the appetite of a Dallas that was slowly beginning to travel and slowly beginning to arrive at the table with more curiosity than it had left with. When Sakurai moved on in 1994, he had been given something more valuable than a job: a kitchen where he learned what Dallas was ready for and how to push it a little further each time.
What Sakurai did with that education became the foundation of Japanese dining in Dallas as it exists today. He opened Teppo Yakitori and Sushi Bar on Lower Greenville in 1995 — a revelation at the time, charcoal-grilled chicken skewers and serious raw fish in a city that still mostly thought of Japanese food as teriyaki. Teppo ran for 27 years before closing in 2022, which is a long life for any restaurant and a remarkable one for a concept that had no precedent in this market. He opened Tei Tei Robata Bar on Henderson Avenue in 1998. He opened Tei-An in the Arts District in 2008, where he makes soba noodles by hand and has drawn guests on private planes from around the country for nearly two decades — a Michelin-recognized kitchen at One Arts Plaza that remains one of the most serious Japanese restaurants in the American South.
In 2025 Hunter Pond of Vandelay Hospitality acquired a majority stake; Sakurai remains a partner and is still in the kitchen, and the restaurant does not open on days he is not there. He recruited friends from Japan to join him — Masayuki Otaka, who ran Teppo alongside him for years and now operates Mābo at Preston Center, one of the most extraordinary Japanese tasting menus in Dallas at $200 per person; Katsutoshi Sakamoto, who was there from opening night as executive chef and took ownership when Sakurai moved on to Tei-An, and who has kept the room running at a high level ever since.
And Sakurai himself, in a detail that says everything about how far the lineage eventually reached, became the teacher of a young chef from Austin named Tyson Cole, who used to drive to Teppo on his nights off to watch and ask questions. Cole went on to open Uchi and Uchiko, building one of the most respected Japanese restaurant groups in the country. The root of that tree, traced back far enough, runs through Royal Tokyo on Greenville Avenue.
The restaurant’s life ended in October 2001 when a fire started in the laundry room and destroyed the rear of the building. Takamatsu and his insurance company entered a dispute over the cost of rebuilding — the figure needed to bring the aging structure up to current codes was close to a million dollars — and the impasse outlasted any reasonable hope of reopening on Greenville. He eventually moved the concept to Far North Dallas as Royal Tokyo Sushi Den, smaller and less elaborate, without the gardens and the koi. The original building at 7525 Greenville Avenue passed to other operators and other names. The koi ponds are long gone.
Takamatsu is survived by his wife of 68 years, Shigeko; his three children, Emiko, Chizuko, and Yoichi; and five grandchildren. He was 94 years old. The Japanese food scene he helped build in this city — the chefs he trained, the kitchen he ran, the standard he set in a Dallas that had no frame of reference for what he was doing — is the lasting measure of what he accomplished.
The best seat at any of Dallas’s serious Japanese restaurants today is, in some small but real sense, a seat he set.
