Katsuya Uechi, the Japanese-born sushi master whose modest Studio City counter grew into an internationally recognized restaurant empire and whose spicy tuna on crispy rice became one of the most imitated bites in American dining, has died at the age of 67. His death was announced on June 26, 2026 by the Katsu-ya Group, which shared the news of the chef it lovingly called Katsu-San and pledged to carry forward "the vision he spent a lifetime perfecting," according to NBC Los Angeles.

Born in 1959 in Miyakojima, in Japan's Okinawa prefecture, Uechi grew up surrounded by food. His family ran a restaurant in Naha, and he absorbed the disciplined traditions of Japanese sushi before deciding to test his craft an ocean away. In 1984 he immigrated to the United States and settled in Los Angeles, a city whose appetite for sushi was only beginning to deepen. He spent years sharpening his knife work and his palate in Southern California kitchens, learning the rhythms of American diners while holding fast to the techniques he had carried from home.

That patience paid off in 1997, when Uechi opened Sushi Katsu-ya on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City. The room was small and unassuming, but the fish was pristine and the ideas were daring, and word raced across the San Fernando Valley. Diners lined up for tables, celebrities slipped in for omakase, and the restaurant quickly became one of the most coveted seats in the city, per ABC7 Los Angeles. Demand soon carried him to additional Sushi Katsu-ya locations across the Valley, in neighborhoods including Encino, Northridge and Woodland Hills.

Uechi's signature gift was a willingness to bend tradition toward pleasure without ever abandoning technique. He is widely credited with popularizing dishes that are now fixtures on Japanese menus far beyond Los Angeles, among them yellowtail with jalapeno and, most famously, crispy rice crowned with spicy tuna. As LAist observed, plates like spicy tuna crispy rice and yellowtail with jalapeno simply would not exist without him.

The crispy rice creation became a phenomenon in its own right. Uechi devised it for a guest who insisted she did not care for sushi, assembling a few bites he hoped might change her mind: a crisp, butter-seared rectangle of vinegared rice topped with spicy bluefin tuna, green onion and a thin slice of chile. The interplay of warm and cool, of crunch and silk, proved impossible to resist. It went on to sell more than two million orders and became the calling card of his restaurants. "Chef takes great pride in his creation, as it has become a signature dish that has evolved and contributed to the fusion of Japanese and American culinary influences," Sam Nazarian, the founder of the SBE hospitality group, told Resy.

That collaboration with Nazarian marked Uechi's second act. Joining forces with SBE and the French designer Philippe Starck, he lent his name and his cooking to a sleeker, design-forward concept called Katsuya. Beginning with a Brentwood flagship in 2006, the Katsuya brand brought theatrical interiors and Uechi's cuisine to Hollywood, Century City and downtown Los Angeles, and in the years that followed to international outposts stretching from the Bahamas to Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain. The same year his second act began, Angeleno magazine named him its chef of the year.

Through both ventures, Uechi remained a chef first, a craftsman defined less by the reach of his empire than by his exacting standard at the cutting board. Those who worked alongside him described a man who treated each piece of fish with reverence and who understood hospitality as a quiet form of generosity. He is survived by his son, Sam, according to NBC Los Angeles. In sharing news of his passing, the Katsu-ya Group wrote, "Rest in peace, Chef. Your legacy lives on in every guest we welcome and every dish we serve."

Katsuya Uechi arrived in Los Angeles as a young chef carrying centuries of tradition, and he left it a different city than the one he found, a place where a sushi counter could be at once a temple of technique and a stage for playful invention. The dishes he dreamed up have been copied so widely that countless diners no longer know whose hands first made them, which may be the truest measure of his influence: his ideas became the everyday vocabulary of how a generation eats. From a single Studio City storefront to dining rooms scattered across the globe, he taught Los Angeles, and then much of the world, to taste sushi his way. His knives are quiet now, but the food he imagined will keep arriving at tables for years to come, and with every plate, the memory of the man who first imagined it.