One of Connecticut’s most interesting restaurants is Miya’s Sushi in New Haven,
where owner Bun Lai and his mother Yoshiko, friends of mine for more than three decades, have transformed one of Connecticut’s older and better traditional Japanese restaurants into a modern prototype for sustainable dining. Miya’s Sushi is considered one of the top sustainable restaurants in America, and Bun is in demand as a top thinker and speaker on sustainability around the world.
To accomplish this with a sushi restaurant is particularly important and challenging work because many of the delicacies sought after for sushi lead to rapacious practices that are destructive to the planet. Gradually, Miya’s has removed popular items from its menu like tuna and shrimp whose harvesting have devastated our oceans and mangrove forests, yet managed to preserve an enthusiastic customer base with enlightened and delicious alternatives.
Rolls feature worldly combinations of ingredients never before thought of. There are menus based on eating invasive species (that’s one way to help eradicate them). Miya’s cultivates some of its food. And Bun even harvests local plant and sea species for use in his food. The results are unusual but amazing!
Our son Jyreh, who was taking a semester break from college overseas and has now returned, was grateful to get the opportunity to work with Bun at Miya’s for a few months.
When it came time for his 25th birthday, he of course wanted to hold it at Miya’s. If you find our family birthday pictures boring, by all means skip ahead to the food pics. Here are my family members posing together,
and here some of them are going in different directions.
But let’s take a brief look at the restaurant itself. The back room fills up on busy nights.
The front room is pretty much full all the time.
And as you can see from this enlargement, it’s a nice place for romantic couples.
Now let’s take a look at Miya’s amazing food. Those of us 21 and over began with beer,
while our youngest had something fun, fruity and non-alcoholic.
After that came an amazing parade of foods, for both the carnivores and vegetarians among us. More than a month has passed since that dinner, so I won’t try to label everything, but the obvious ones I will reveal. This is the Tokyo ’Fro, Afro-shaped curls of potato.
Salad days is served with a wild ramp and basil dressing.
Potato formed the base of these delicious offerings,
while these rolls were wrapped in grape leaves.
Here is some delicate raw fish.
After that, it was one incredible roll after another.
Miya’s even pickles its own ginger without additives.
The dessert at this highly festive occasion was tempura ice cream.
Here’s our son preparing to extinguish the flame through a martial arts demonstration,
and here he is afterward.
And here is a last look at our handsome son with our good friend Bun.
Miya’s Sushi, 68 Howe Street, New Haven, 203-777-9760, www.miyassushi.com