Kura Revolving Sushi Bar opens at Smith Haven Mall
The Carle Place location of Kura Revolving Sushi Bar, a trendy sushi chain from Japan. Credit: Newsday/Andi Berlin
From California Pizza Kitchen to a Tokyo sushi bar, the Smith Haven Mall is the second Long Island location of a buzzy Japanese chain, Kura Revolving Sushi Bar.
With more than 500 shops across Japan, Kura has expanded across the U.S. in the past few years and now operates restaurants in Carle Place, Flushing and Scarsdale. The latest edition in Lake Grove takes over the former California Pizza Kitchen that closed in December.
The buzz isn't about the sushi — it's about the fun dining experience marked by robot servers, animé superheroes and prizes at the end of your meal. Diners sit in a private booth equipped with a video screen that plays an animé cartoon with a hero named Mutenmaru, who has to overcome obstacles as sushi plates are taken from the conveyor belt. If you're able to eat 15 plates of sushi, the current prize is a mini keychain that looks like a piece of sushi inside its plastic bubble plate. The sushi quality at Kura is mid-to-low, but the dishes from the kitchen are surprisingly great, especially the beef udon soup and the taiyaki ice cream with a sweet fish-shaped pancake.
A photo posted Tuesday on X (formerly Twitter) from the new Lake Grove location shows a line of patrons winding around the side of the building. Wait times for the soft opening at Carle Place last August were hovering around the six-hour mark. On Wednesday afternoon, the Kura Sushi app listed the live wait time for Lake Grove at five minutes, although it took 20 minutes to get a message that a table was ready. Right now the restaurant is only accepting walk-ins, and recommending patrons visit the store to be added to the waitlist.
The Smith Haven Mall is not far from Stony Brook University, which has become a destination for Asian food with an outpost of the Asian fusion restaurant Mito as well as one of Long Island's best ramen shops, Yume in the food court. The mall has also been touting another location of the Korean barbecue chain KPOT for more than a year now. It's still listed as coming soon on the website.
Kura Revolving Sushi Bar, 619 Smith Haven Mall Suite P01, Lake Grove, 631-621-6355, kurasushi.com. Open 11:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday, and 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Sunday.
Andi Berlin is from Arizona and does not know where she is going. But when she gets there, she’ll find something beautiful and delicious that the world needs to taste.