This French restaurant, a longtime Johnson County mainstay, will close permanently

Tatsu’s French Restaurant, a Prairie Village mainstay for decades, will be closing permanently.

Chef and owner Tatsu Arai first opened a French pastry and lunch spot in 1980, but customers clamored for more. So he added dinner.

Now he plans to “explore his retirement” and will close on June 13.

“I’m very happy. I’m 69 1/2 almost and I was thinking about retiring before the pandemic,” Arai said Wednesday. “I started calling my customers a couple of weeks ago and they have been calling me every day. I’m all booked through June 12.”

On Tatsu’s Facebook page, fans posted such comments as: “So sad, end of one of the greatest restaurants of our city for so long. Thanks for all your hard work,” and “So many family memories there! Thank you for those! And the wonderful food and gathering spot!!”

Arai mastered French cuisine as a young chef in Tokyo, starting when he was 16. He moved to Chicago in his early 20s to work at a friend’s French restaurant and then at the famed Maxim’s.

He returned to Japan for a couple of months, then committed to working at a friend’s Country Club Plaza Japanese steakhouse for two years.

But he loves to cook and steaks weren’t his kind of cooking. He wanted his own spot, a French restaurant, to make just enough money to “pay the rent, go out for dinner and have a little savings,” he said a few months after the Tatsu’s opening in April 1980.

The restaurant, at 4603 W. 90th St., serves such items as Escargots de Bourgogne, Foie de Veau and salmon Meuniére.

He also tried a casual version of the restaurant, KC Toaster’s Sandwich Cafe, but it didn’t catch on.

He shut down lunch service at the Prairie Village restaurant in February because of restrictions from COVID-19 and staffing issues.

“We aren’t the carryout kind of restaurant,” he said. “And i don’t use the new technology, Facebook and all of that, I’m too old for that.”

This story was originally published June 2, 2021 at 11:53 AM.