Nationally Renowned New Haven Restaurant To Close

NEW HAVEN, CT — Miya's, which has been called the first sustainable sushi restaurant and won a coveted James Beard Award, will close at the end of 2020.

Owner Bun Lai said on Twitter: "At the end of 2020, w the deepest gratitude in our hearts to everybody who has carried us along the way, Miya's will close its doors. We chose to close-sooner rather than later-so that my family and I would still be healthy enough to be able to give back more but in other ways."

Miya's has been hailed as an innovative restaurant, winning the 2016 White House Champions of Change Award. It has been covered in a range of national media outlets including The Atlantic and The New York Times. Lai was featured in The New Yorker for his "invasive species" menu, that includes everything from lionfish to tiny crabs and weeds.

"An important goal of ours is to have our cuisine return to the roots of sushi, meaning simply to use what we have available where we live,"the restaurant's website reads.

Miya's was the first sushi restaurant in New Haven in the early 1980s. Over time, the menu became more sustainable and plant-based, which was a move Lai said was inspired by his mother's upbringing in southern Japan, The New Haven Register reported.

During this year, the Howe Street restaurant will offer a one-page menu with rotating creations from its library of original sustainable sushi recipes.

"Items from this menu will be priced as low as possible so that more people will be able to experience something very meaningful that we all created together," Lai wrote on Facebook.

Miya's receives a 3.5 star rating on Yelp. Reviewers raved about the pumpkin miso soup, fried tofu, and, of course, the sushi: "It was fresh, delicious, innovative, and I seriously could have eaten piece after piece until I needed to be rolled out of the building."

Though the unusual approach is not everyone's cup of tea, with one reviewer saying "the sushi roll(s) were something I cannot understand."