Sushi Village Left A Note On The Door. Hicksville's Restaurant Scene Moved On Without It.

On June 28, someone taped a handwritten note to the door of Sushi Village on West Old Country Road. It thanked customers for their "support, kindness and loyalty throughout the years" and offered no explanation for why the all-you-can-eat sushi spot, a Hicksville staple since 2012, was suddenly gone. Three weeks later, on July 20, Jani closed a few blocks away on North Broadway, its Chinese-Japanese menu a fixture of that stretch for years. There was no note this time. The explanation came later, from the family of the restaurant's longtime manager and host, Alexander Shah, who had stopped working the year before and died of pancreatic cancer that December.

Two restaurants, two quiet endings, both inside a three-week window this summer. If you eat in Hicksville regularly, you probably noticed the gaps before you read a word about why. What's harder to see from the sidewalk is that these closures aren't really the story. The story is where the next generation of restaurants is actually landing, and it isn't in either of those buildings.

What Closed, And What It Replaced

Sushi Village's building has its own layered history. Before it was a sushi restaurant, it was the Beverly Diner, and before that, the Sizzler Family Steakhouse, according to the Hicksville Library. That kind of turnover is normal for a single storefront over five decades. What's less normal is watching two long-tenured, independently run restaurants close within weeks of each other without a franchise buyer or new tenant already lined up. As of mid-August, Sushi Village's building sits vacant, its exterior chained shut.

These weren't isolated incidents in an otherwise stable restaurant row, either. Long-running restaurant Peppercorns, a cornerstone in the community for more than four decades and housed in a building dating to the late 1800s, had already closed its doors, with co-owners citing the financial strain of staying open since the pandemic. A preservation effort emerged around saving the building itself, separate from the restaurant that once filled it. The pattern across all three closures is the same: these were not chain locations with a corporate parent deciding to cut losses. They were independently owned restaurants that had been part of the neighborhood for a decade or longer, closing on their own terms and, in Sushi Village's case, without much warning to regulars.

The New Openings Aren't Filling The Same Storefronts

Here's where the map gets interesting. None of the high-profile new restaurants that have opened in Hicksville over the past year and a half are stepping into a recently vacated space. They're building fresh footprints in different corridors entirely.

Food Street, a Pakistani fusion chain blending South Asian comfort food with smash burgers, opened its first New York location in late May at 350 South Broadway, inside the Soni Centre strip mall on Route 107. It's the chain's twelfth location overall, and the opening day crowd reportedly overwhelmed the kitchen. Co-owner Sharry Chaudhari described the scene afterward:

"It was 40 minutes after we were supposed to close and people were still showing up."

A few minutes south, Ficarra Ristorante opened at 400 South Oyster Bay Road last spring, an upscale Italian-American buildout from Sicilian-American owner Carl Mattone, with his wife Demetra Mattone running events and catering. The restaurant leaned into a family narrative from day one, built around Mattone's mother's cooking, and it's kept a steady stream of strong reviews since its late April debut. Around the same stretch of town, Hook & Reel Cajun Seafood & Bar opened its first Long Island location, bringing New Orleans-style seafood boils to a market that didn't have one before.

Notice what these three have in common: Route 107, South Oyster Bay Road, and the strip retail built around them. Not one of them chose a standalone storefront on the older stretch of North Broadway or Old Country Road where Sushi Village, Jani, and Peppercorns used to sit. The new investment is landing in a different part of town than the old restaurants occupied. It's not only new construction pulling attention either. O Mandarin, already established in town, has chef Eric Gao in contention for a statewide best chef recognition, a reminder that Hicksville's dining reputation is climbing even as familiar storefronts go dark.

The Empty Middle Ground

There's a third piece to this that explains a lot of the reshuffling: the Broadway Commons mall, long the anchor of Hicksville's retail and dining identity, has had a dark food court since New Year's Eve 2025. Ownership stopped renewing food court leases roughly a year before that, according to the property's marketing and business development manager, Brianna Spaziante, who said the strategy was deliberate as a $200 million redevelopment moved through the approval process.

That redevelopment, now called The Shops on Broadway, cleared a major hurdle on August 11 when the Oyster Bay Town Board approved a set of zoning and special-use variances needed to move forward. The plan, backed by a local investor group that bought the mall for just over $40 million in 2024, would tear the roof off much of the enclosed structure and rebuild it as an open-air shopping, dining, and entertainment destination, closer to how the property looked when it first opened in 1956 as the Mid-Island Shopping Plaza. Target, IKEA, and Round1 Bowling & Arcade are the only tenants guaranteed to stay through construction, with IKEA expanding and a new BJ's Wholesale Club joining as the anchor addition. The vacant Macy's building is expected to come down by the end of this year, and the old food court will be replaced by a section called The District, an open-air dining and gathering space with outdoor seating and string lights, designed for movie nights and live performances.

None of that construction has broken ground yet. With the zoning and special-use approvals now in hand, developers are targeting an early 2027 groundbreaking. In the meantime, the mall's interior sits with more vacant storefronts than restaurant tenants, which means the biggest planned wave of new dining in Hicksville is still a year or more away from opening its doors. The restaurants closing now aren't being replaced by what's coming. They're closing during the gap before it arrives.

What This Means If You're Eating In Hicksville This Fall

If you're used to grabbing sushi on West Old Country Road or Chinese-Japanese comfort food on North Broadway, those specific options are gone for now, and there's no indication anyone has signed a lease to reopen either space. But the neighborhood hasn't gone without options. A few worth knowing about while you wait to see what fills those two storefronts:

• Kirazu Sushi & Hibachi, Lemonleaf Grill, and Noodumpling are all still open and serving the Asian cuisine niche that Sushi Village and Jani used to cover.
• Food Street at 350 South Broadway is the newest addition if you want to see what drew lines out the door in May.
• Ficarra Ristorante at 400 South Oyster Bay Road is open Tuesday through Sunday for anyone looking for a sit-down Italian option that didn't exist in town before last spring.
• Hook & Reel brings a seafood boil format that's new to Hicksville specifically, not just new as a location.

The bigger shift to watch isn't which restaurant opens next. It's what happens to Broadway Commons once demolition starts. When that food court space reopens as The District sometime after 2027, it will likely become the biggest concentration of new restaurant tenants the neighborhood has seen in years, and it will be built from scratch rather than backfilled into an older storefront. Until then, Hicksville's dining map is genuinely in transition, not declining, just relocating one lease at a time from the old corridors to the new ones.

If you're watching Hicksville change from the outside, whether you already live here or you're weighing whether this is the kind of neighborhood where a home holds its value while the surrounding commercial base reinvests itself, that's exactly the kind of on-the-ground read the Michelle Zhao Group tracks block by block across Long Island's North Shore. If a move is somewhere on your horizon, Request a Luxury Home Valuation and let's talk about what a changing Hicksville means for your timing.