The corner of Sunrise Highway and Veterans Memorial Highway keeps adding names. The latest to appear on the tenant plan at the Shops at SunVet in Holbrook is Naya, the Lebanese fast-casual chain that grew out of a single Midtown Manhattan dining room, and the lease makes this its first location in Suffolk County.

Regency Centers, the landlord redeveloping the old SunVet Mall property, now shows Naya holding Suite 630, a 2,316-square-foot space marked leased on the center's plan, and the center's own store directory has added the restaurant to its lineup. Naya's location page does not yet list Holbrook, and no opening date has been announced.

From one dining room on Second Avenue to forty locations

Naya began in 2008 as NAYA Mezze & Grill, a full-service restaurant on Second Avenue in Midtown East. Its founder, Hady Kfoury, was raised in Beirut and built the menu around the food he grew up on, working from recipes developed by his mother and his aunt. The restaurant earned early attention in the New York press, and Kfoury eventually reworked the concept into a fast-casual format: the same Lebanese cooking, served as build-your-own bowls, rolls and salads with as many toppings as a customer cares to pile on.

That format traveled. The company today counts 40 locations across five states, most of them in Manhattan, with outposts reaching Boston, Connecticut, New Jersey and Philadelphia.

Fourth on Long Island, first in Suffolk

Long Island has been part of that map for a while, but only on one side of the county line. Naya's own locator lists three Long Island restaurants: New Hyde Park on Marcus Avenue, Oceanside on Long Beach Road, and a Roosevelt Field Mall location in Garden City. All three sit in Nassau.

Holbrook changes that. When the SunVet restaurant opens, it will be the chain's fourth Long Island location and the first one a Suffolk reader can get to without a Southern State merge. For the growing lunch crowd around the Veterans Memorial Highway office and industrial corridor, and for anyone whose rotation of quick meals in the Sachem area currently tops out at the usual chicken and burger names, a counter serving shawarma-spiced bowls and fresh pita is a genuinely new option rather than another version of an existing one.

The old mall keeps filling in

The story around the restaurant is at least as interesting as the restaurant itself. The SunVet Mall opened in 1974 and spent its last years as the kind of enclosed mall people drove past rather than into. Regency Centers has been rebuilding the property since 2023 as an open-air, grocery-anchored center of just under 170,000 square feet, and the tenant list has been landing in waves: a 40,000-square-foot Whole Foods anchors it, alongside Nordstrom Rack, Ross Dress for Less, Sephora, J.Crew Factory, Warby Parker, Starbucks, Shake Shack, Tony's Tacos and Riko's Pizza. Crumbl added its cookies over the summer.

Naya slots into that food lineup as the center's Middle Eastern option, and the leasing plan says the filling-in is not finished: three more spaces, running from 3,000 to just under 4,800 square feet, are still marked available. The corner Holbrook spent two decades writing off has quietly become the busiest retail story in the Sachem area.

What to watch for

With the lease signed and the directory listing live, the remaining question is timing. The chain has been opening locations at a steady clip, and fast-casual buildouts in second-generation retail space tend to move quickly once permits are in hand. When Naya sets a date for Holbrook, the sign to watch is the one in the window of Suite 630, in a shopping center that three years ago most of Sachem had stopped walking into at all.