Zen Sushi has closed in the Bishop Arts District after nearly two decades at 380 W. Seventh St., and with it goes one of the more important sushi counters in Dallas history.
The reason it mattered starts with the woman behind it. Michelle Carpenter was the first woman to work as a sushi chef in Dallas, and Zen made her the first woman to own and run a sushi restaurant here.
Carpenter was born in Tokyo to a Japanese mother and an American father. Her father’s Air Force career brought the family to San Antonio, and she started picking up work in Japanese restaurants off base. In her early twenties she decided rolling sushi wasn’t enough and set out to become an itamae, the title a Japanese sushi master earns over years at the counter.
No American cooking school taught that. So she moved to San Diego and spent two years training under several master itamae.
She came back to Texas in 1989 and went to work at Mr. Sushi in Addison. From there she moved to Yamaguchi’s in the Park Cities, at the time one of the most respected sushi bars in the city. She worked under the master itamae there, known to everyone as Yama-San, and was eventually promoted to executive chef. He let her write a menu that strayed from tradition, and she built a following of her own.
She opened Zen Sushi in 2007, when Bishop Arts was still a few blocks of independent shops and had no sushi bar at all.
The food was Japanese technique with a Texas address. Carpenter put lime, cilantro and jalapeño on high-grade fish and served it to a neighborhood that hadn’t seen it before. The Sakura Roll, her own creation with crab, shrimp and clam wrapped in soy paper, stayed on the menu for years. She also ran a full vegan menu long before most Dallas restaurants offered one, with rolls like the Vegan Beet Xalapa Roll.
“Food, like any form of culture, has to evolve and change,” Carpenter wrote on Zen’s website. “Food needs to modernize and reinvent itself. Food is also a form of sharing and connection.”
The closing comes five months after Carpenter shut Restaurant Beatrice, her Cajun restaurant in Oak Cliff, in June while she recovered from surgery to remove a brain tumor. Zen stayed open through the summer and fall.
Carpenter has spent nearly 40 years behind Dallas sushi counters. Her own account of that career is still up on Zen’s website, and it closes with a thank-you to the customers who followed her for more than 20 years.
