The Jani sign is not done with Hicksville. The Chinese and Japanese restaurant that fed North Broadway for three decades went dark this past July, and new banners in its windows now promise a second act: JANI Indian Cuisine, a new restaurant keeping the old name, from the family behind India Cafe.

Three decades at 260 North Broadway

Jani opened in the mid-1990s and spent three decades doing something genuinely unusual: running a Chinese kitchen and a sushi bar under one roof and doing both well enough that nobody blinked. The menu ran long in the old style, soup dumplings and boneless spare ribs on one page, spicy tuna rolls and sashimi platters on the next, with lunch specials that made it a default for half the offices on Broadway.

The neighborhood noticed. By the time it closed, Jani had collected more than 600 Google reviews averaging 4.3 stars, which for a strip-plaza Chinese and Japanese restaurant is the local equivalent of a lifetime achievement award. Regulars are still arguing in those reviews about whether the kung pao chicken or the three-roll lunch special was the real draw.

Then, in July, it went quiet. The phone stopped being answered, the listing flipped to permanently closed, and one more familiar storefront on North Broadway looked like it was headed for a long vacancy.

The new name is the old name

It is not headed for a vacancy. Banners now hang in the windows at 260 North Broadway reading Coming Soon above JANI Indian Cuisine, and a second sign answers the obvious question: new name, same owners as India Cafe.

Keeping the name is the clever part. Jani is how people in Hicksville have given directions for three decades, and a restaurant that inherits a name like that inherits every regular who slows down out of habit. The letters on the sign stay. Everything coming out of the kitchen changes continents.

The family behind it has been at this for 15 years

India Cafe is not a first-time operator. The company has been in state business records since 2010 and runs two restaurants on the Queens and Nassau border country: one on Jericho Turnpike in Floral Park and one on Lefferts Boulevard in South Richmond Hill. The menus there run through the North Indian canon, butter chicken and goat curry, tandoori platters, biryani and a deep vegetarian bench, the kind of cooking that travels well and feeds a table of six without a debate.

The move east follows a path a generation of Queens restaurants has taken before it, out along the turnpikes toward the Nassau and Suffolk towns where their customers kept moving. For India Cafe, Hicksville is not a gamble on a new audience. It is a move toward one that is already there.

Hicksville is the right room

No hamlet on Long Island eats more Indian food than Hicksville. Broadway is the Island's Indian dining corridor, home to the dosa landmarks, the sweets counters and the newer dining rooms that have turned the hamlet into a destination for the whole region. We mapped the highlights in our guide to eating Indian food in Hicksville, from the dosa landmark to the new Bombay-glam room, and the list keeps growing.

260 North Broadway sits at the top of that run. An Indian kitchen stepping into a beloved address on that particular street is about as close to a sure read on a neighborhood as the restaurant business allows.

What happens next

There is no opening date yet. The banners say coming soon and nothing more, no menu has been posted, and the new owners have not put a week on the calendar. That is normal for a takeover of this size; dining rooms get reworked, kitchens get re-equipped, and coming soon can mean a month or a season.

What a reader can bank on now is simpler. The address that fed Hicksville for three decades is not becoming a vape shop or sitting dark behind brown paper. The sign stays, the lights come back, and the next thing served under the four letters everyone already knows will be butter chicken instead of General Tso's. When an opening date lands, you will read it here.