Hisashi Takimoto, owner of the popular Taki’s Healthy Japanese Food Restaurant at East Colfax Avenue and Logan Street, died Monday of natural causes alone in his sparse east Denver apartment. He was 62.
Taki, as he was known, was remembered almost universally as a kind and generous man “who practiced random acts of kindness as a way of life,” according to Maureen Hartman, his neighbor for 22 years.
“He’d leave plates of food for us, or a bottle of sake, for no reason other than a pleasant surprise.”
Yet he lived a solitary life when away from his restaurant, where he worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week.
“He was married to his restaurant,” said close friend and confidant Jan Shannon, who lives in Hawaii. “He never entertained and rarely went out. He was a devout Buddhist.”
Tony Bosser went to work for Taki at the start, when he opened the Golden Tempura Bowl restaurant in 1990, across Colfax from the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception.
Behind the counter Tuesday, Bosser teared up remembering his boss and friend: “He was very kind, a very generous man who loved to give people things.”
Taki promoted healthy food, without preservatives or MSG. He was a fanatical believer in the healing powers of Colorado-grown edamame or raw soybeans, which he fed free to all children, and of his untraditionally flavored ginger and garlic miso soup, which he called “a flu shot in the bowl.”
He spent years developing a concentrated soup paste, which he wholesaled, as well as edamame, to Whole Foods, Vitamin Cottage and other food retailers.
Known for its huge portions and cheap prices, the restaurant attracted everyone from governors and politicians to the homeless who populated the area.
“Here was an immigrant from Japan giving jobs and food to all kinds of people,” said Shannon, his landlord for nine years.
“He’d have Mongolian medical students hanging out, listening to Russian music. There were Iranians, Mexicans, Japanese, senators and the homeless.
“He was a very good businessman, a real tough negotiator, but we called him Mr. Magoo because he never filed anything and could never find anything. He was still using an abacus.”
In 1998, he moved the restaurant across Colfax to its present location. It was damaged by a kitchen fire in August 1999, but he rebuilt it and reopened in April 2000.
Taki trained as an accountant in his native Japan before he moved to an uncle’s house in Hawaii in the late 1970s. Two years later, he was lured to Vail by the unscrupulous owner of a Japanese restaurant. “I suffered” was how he described his two years there, sleeping on floors, being shorted on pay and generally taken advantage of.
He worked in a series of cheap restaurants and bars in Boulder and Denver, suffering a broken nose from a drunk customer one night, before realizing his dream of opening his own place in 1990.
“He had $100 to his name by the time he opened Golden Tempura Bowl,” Shannon said.
He was married briefly but had no children, and he leaves a sister and an aunt in Japan. He was a devout member of the SGI Buddhist Center near Colfax and Speer Boulevard. Services there are pending, once permission from his family is received to cremate his body, said Patti Coutts, a friend who works at the restaurant. She said Taki’s will remain open for the foreseeable future.
Mike McPhee: 303-954-1409 or mmcphee@denverpost.com
