100-year-old house at tea garden still stands in San Antonio

Jingu House sits atop San Antonio’s Japanese Tea Garden, where the restaurant overlooks an oasis of greenery and scenic views. For over a century, the Japanese eatery has undergone numerous transformations alongside the garden, including changes of ownership, names and even nationalities amid anti-Japanese sentiments during World War II.

For better or for worse, the Japanese Tea Garden has endured for more than 100 years as one of San Antonio’s most beautiful attractions. Today, Jingu House continues to operate atop the garden with a menu that nods to its history, serving a mix of Japanese and San Antonio flavors.

The Japanese Tea Garden was built inside an abandoned rock quarry between 1917 and 1919 under the direction of Ray Lambert, San Antonio’s Park Commissioner at the time. The garden’s construction, which was allegedly powered by prison labor, continued in 1920, adding a small village of houses somewhere along the premises. Sometime during this period, the structure now known as Jingu House was erected at the Japanese Tea Garden. 

Following the garden’s opening, the city of San Antonio called upon Kimi Eizo Jingu, an artist and tea importer with roots in Japan, to become its onsite caretaker and to operate a restaurant known as Bamboo Room. Numerous sources, including the Jingu family’s website, assert that the business first opened in 1926. Jingu, along with his wife Miyoshi, would go on to sell food, tea and novelties at the Bamboo Room to visitors of the Japanese Tea Garden in the years that followed. 

Jingu died in 1938, but Miyoshi and their children would continue to care for the garden in his absence. All that would change following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. 

An anti-Japanese movement rose across the United States after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, impacting Jingu House and the Japanese Tea Garden directly. The Jingu family was evicted in 1942, and the name of the garden was changed to the Chinese Tea Garden as a result of rising anti-Japanese discrimination. Other fixtures of the garden were also renamed or built to reflect Chinese culture, including a gateway that says “Chinese Tea Garden,” which still stands today.

A Chinese American family by the name of Wu would go on to take over Bamboo Room, a responsibility that extended well into the 1960s. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the gardens were officially renamed once again, reclaiming their former Japanese Tea Garden moniker. A ceremony was held in 1984 to commemorate the return to its origins, and members of the Jingu family and the Japanese government were in attendance. 

From 2007 to 2015, the Japanese Tea Garden underwent a huge renovation to the tune of $2 million. In 2011, amidst the park’s improvements, Jingu House reopened as a cafe under Fresh Horizons Creative Catering. Light bites from various Asian cuisines were served at the former Bamboo Room for more than a decade before new ownership moved into and revamped the concept.

In 2023, Cappy Lawton, the restaurateur behind Cappy’s Restaurant and Mama’s Cafe, announced that he had taken over at Jingu House. The restaurant entered a new era as an elevated snack bar, offering items like tonkotsu ramen, chicken katsu, sushi and bento boxes. The menu (and much of the cafe’s aesthetic) pays homage to the Japanese culture that was first infused with the garden all those decades ago.