Huntington village has a new address for sushi, and the man behind it took the long way home. Oku, a modern Japanese restaurant from chef and owner Jeff Lee, is now open at 255 Main St., in the heart of the village's restaurant row. Lee trained at Nobu and Sushi Samba in Manhattan, then spent more than a decade running kitchens at two of Dubai's most prominent five-star hotels. Oku is what he came back to build.

The innermost place

The name is the concept. Oku is a Japanese word for the deep interior of a place, the part of a house you only reach when someone invites you in, and the restaurant is built around that idea: a dim, deliberate room where the meal unfolds slowly rather than a scene where it competes with the noise. The menu reads the same way. Dishes are meant to be shared and paced, and the kitchen puts its energy into sourcing and precision rather than spectacle.

That is a distinct bet for Main Street, where plenty of rooms lean loud. It is also the kind of restaurant Long Islanders have historically driven into Manhattan for.

From Nobu to the Palm, and back

Lee's resume explains the ambition. He built his career over two decades in Japanese kitchens, starting at Nobu and Sushi Samba, two of the restaurants that defined modern Japanese dining in New York. He then moved to Dubai, where he directed culinary operations at the Fairmont on Palm Jumeirah and The Address Downtown, hotels that sit at the center of one of the most competitive dining cities in the world.

After more than ten years abroad, he chose Huntington for his own name-on-the-door restaurant. That homecoming is the story here: chefs with this track record open in TriBeCa or Miami far more often than they open on a Long Island Main Street.

What is on the menu

The menu runs from familiar to serious. Classic rolls and hand rolls start around $8, and a la carte nigiri runs $7 to $11 a piece, so a casual dinner is possible. The signature rolls are where the kitchen shows off: a Golden Wagyu roll at $31, a Truffle Hamachi at $27, a Black Dragon at $23.

Starters lean composed rather than fried. An oyster trio arrives with avocado mousse and yuzu foam. There are Korean BBQ wings, tuna cones, and a steak tartare. Entrees from the sushi bar top out at a signature platter for $115, with a sashimi platter at $60 and a miso black cod at $38, the dish that has been shorthand for upscale Japanese dining since Nobu made it famous.

For the full experience, Oku offers omakase at two levels: a sushi omakase built on the season's best catch, and a premium multi-course version. Dessert keeps the theme, with matcha mille crepes, a salted caramel chocolate souffle and a yuzu cheesecake. The sake list runs from $13 glasses to bottles priced near $200, alongside wine and Japanese beer.

A corner that keeps trying Japanese

The address will be familiar to village regulars. 255 Main St. sits on the stretch of Main Street where Huntington's dining density is at its highest, and the storefront has cycled through Asian kitchens in recent years, most recently the sushi and ramen spot Odori. Oku is the most ambitious swing the space has seen.

Hours and reservations

Oku serves dinner Tuesday through Thursday from 5 to 9:30 p.m. and Friday from 5 to 10:30 p.m. Weekends start at noon: Saturday from 12 to 10:30 p.m. and Sunday from 12 to 9:30 p.m., which makes it one of the few rooms of this caliber on the Island where a sushi lunch is on the table. The restaurant is closed Mondays.

Reservations are on Resy, or by phone at 631-223-0303. Walk-ins will find the room at its calmest early in the week.

For Huntington, the arrival is one more data point in a strong year for the village's restaurant scene. For everyone else on the Island, it is simpler than that: a chef who cooked at Nobu and ran kitchens on the Palm Jumeirah is now making nigiri in Suffolk County, and the drive is a lot shorter than the one his career took.