Texas Tabelog

Tatsu Dallas
3309 Elm St, Ste. 120, Dallas, TX 75226
Google: 4.7 Stars (121 reviews)

Habibi-San’s Rating:

In 1978, Saddam Hussein’s favorite television show was the soap opera, “Dallas.” I am certain he could relate mightily to the Texan oil wars, but less so to the capitalistic motives of the Ewing family. Because of Saddam’s “Kim Jung Un-esque” love for hyper specific elements of American culture, my mother also grew up watching “Dallas” in Baghdad. But even after all the “Dallas” indoctrination, my mother immigrated to San Antonio after Saddam’s “oopsie” with the Ba’ath party.

After meeting a young man in College Station, she moved to Dallas where she started a family. While it may not have been as picturesque or dramatic as the lives of the Ewings on Southfork Ranch, an Iraqi immigrant made the suburbs of North Dallas her home.

I will not pretend that I spent the evenings of my adolescent years sampling high-end cuisine in Uptown. In Plano, I studied at the same rate and ate the same food as my Southeast Asian neighbors. But every so often, my father would come home from work with four Dallas Mavericks season tickets from his employer (after the VP, his skip, and his boss all turned them down) to plan a boy’s trip into town. Sometimes if it were a weekend game, we would stop at Cafe Madrid on Knox Henderson and sample Spanish tapas. More realistically though, we would go to El Fenix next to the Perot Museum on account of a shorter wait and validation to use their parking lot.

Who cares if we were playing the Charlotte Bobcats and Al Jefferson was injured? The tickets were free, and I just got a high five from Marquis freaking Daniels. I even saw Steve Nash’s first game wearing a Suns jersey in the American Airlines Center with those corporate tickets. Granted we were a quarter and a half late because my little brother had separation anxiety from our mother at the time.

(I know a few of you reading this may be thinking to yourselves, “How could that photo be from the same game in 2004? Avery Johnson was not the head coach until 2005!” Avery Johnson was Don Nelson’s lead assistant in 2004, so it makes sense that he would be there to overlook Dirk and Steve’s embrace with an expression of pure emotive lizard joy!)

Would you look at that? Two immigrants, one from Germany and one from Canada, unilaterally embraced by the Dallas community as one of our own. Obviously, this is not a sports phenomenon unique to Dallas. I am sure the good people of the D.C. metro would sing the Russian national anthem if it meant that Alex Ovechkin breaks Wayne Gretzky’s NHL goal record. However, the cultural difference between Washington D.C. and Dallas is monumental.

For instance, there is an inverse correlation between the stretch of Dallas’ urban sprawl and the strength of the city’s culture. Nationwide, we are better known for Rolex flaring and Patagonia vest wearing Goldman Sachs analysts than we are for ranch hands and ten gallon hats. So, when a giant German comes to town singing “WHAM” and scoring 30,000 points, we did not hesitate to make him a staple of our culture.

I feel similarly about Chef Tatsuya Sekiguchi, a chef hailing from Hasuda City, Saitama, Japan. After working at his father’s 100 year old Edomae-style restaurant (a style from the Edo period that refers to the abundance of seafood in Tokyo bay), Chef Sekiguchi led a top ten restaurant in New York and his own pop up for two years in Manhattan before deciding to move to…DALLAS?! For context, here is a cherry blossom festival in his hometown.

Also, he was working one block away from the Chrysler Building and decided to relocate to DEEP ELLUM!!

According to Dallas Eater, “Sekiguchi first traveled to Dallas [in 2020], and immediately fell in love with the city. Sekiguchi recently bought his first pair of cowboy boots, a pair of Luccheses he proudly showed off on Instagram, declaring he was becoming more Texan day by day.”

Where have I seen this before? A highly skilled immigrant who happens to fall in love with Dallas? It is important to remember that Dirk was not the only immigrant who had an exceptional career in Dallas. My mother bore three boys. All three of us hold masters’ degrees and two of the three of us have recently married lovely Dallas girls, so the analogy holds. (She has yet to earn herself a championship though, aka grandchild #1).

For some inexplicable reason (no state income tax?), Chef Tatsuya signed a max contract in Deep Ellum to provide us with the best omakase in the city. The name of his restaurant is Tatsu Dallas and even his smoker prepares Spanish Mackerel with an added bit of Texan flare during his nightly showcase.

Even the ambience of his lobby is unmatched. Chef Tatsuya had the audacity to play Nujabes in the foyer while I was three cups deep into a carafe of imported sake. It was hard to stay impartial for the rest of the night while rocking a buzz and listening to “Reflection Eternal,” but I tried my best.

For all my preparation, I neglected to take a picture of the daily curated menu. My idiotic inner voice told me I would remember to bring the menu home as a keepsake, but the overwhelming depression I felt from the meal coming to an end silenced any internal reminders. Believe me when I say that it was the best meal I have ever had, well worth the price if looking for an annual splurge. Having never been blessed to try omakase, I will describe some notable bites in an uneducated yet succinct way. My biggest takeaway was that the texture of every bite was not a byproduct of nature, but had been delicately softened by the Chef to produce the most rewarding bite. And while the meal was fantastic, the show was mesmerizing.

Our appetizer was tempura mackerel that was lightly battered, but still perfectly crunchy and salty. We ate green onion sprigs locally sourced in North Texas which paired expertly well with the vinegar of the rice. The snow crab was impossibly soft and richly flavorful as if the Chef had malleated the once stringy texture into a succulent blob. The unagi was broiled flawlessly and any skin and pin bones were removed for maximum enjoyment. The sea urchin created a sensation of mouth-watering hydration as if you had just bitten into an overripe tomato. And of course the ootoro, the fatty tuna belly, was the highlight of the meal for me. The rich creamy tuna was imbibed with drops of lemon juice and flaky salt to create the perfect bite. Each morsel of the ootoro sells for $20 a la carte, and I could not help but order a second serving after trying it in the main course.

Now what if, hypothetically, the City of Dallas traded Chef Tatsuya to Los Angeles for a Panda Express with a history of E. Coli outbreaks?

For years, I have associated the City of Dallas with one word, loyalty. For a city that does not have a lot of uniqueness besides a neon skyline and a museum for a murdered president, I was proud to associate my city with loyalty. I fear that the loyalty to the immigrants that manufacture this city’s culture is eroding because of one former Nike executive. I do not care if that sounds hyperbolic. It is a worldview I had built for myself from an early age to grapple with the spot of land upon which God decided to spit me out.

I bet Chef Samir, the founder of Nick and Sam’s steakhouse in Uptown, would echo my sentiments. The man who founded arguably the best steakhouse in town is an Indian immigrant whose favorite customer is the best basketball player in the WORLD, a Slovenian immigrant. I will allow Chef Samir to bid Luka farewell on my behalf because Ernest Hemmingway himself would be unable to commit my current schizophrenic range of emotion to paper.

Dallas’ greatest exports are its imports. God bless Chef Tatsuya, God bless Luka Doncic, and motherfuck Nico Harrison.

Ma al salama (さようなら ),
Habibi-san