Legendary New York sushi chef Eiji Ichimura, whose earned his first Michelin stars — two of them — at Brushstroke in 2014 and decided to make a namesake restaurant on Greenwich his swan song, will retire at the end of the summer. A. sent the news from Eater, and I checked in with Tribecan Rahul Saito, who opened Sushi Ichimura with the chef in June 2023, nestled between his two other restaurants on Greenwich.

“Chef Eiji Ichimura will be retiring from Sushi Ichimura on August 14, 2025, and Sushi Ichimura will be the last full-time role in his illustrious career,” Saito told subscribers in an email.  “Chef Ichimura will be devoting more time to his family and prioritizing personal pursuits in the future. It will be our great pleasure to welcome you back to our intimate ten-seat counter for one last time so we can toast to Chef Ichimura and thank him for introducing his craft of sushi to New York.”

This is the last time the 71-year-old Ichimura will run his own restaurant, though I imagine he will never stop cooking and inventing in the kitchen.

Ichimura is known for his methods of curing and aging fish and his seasoned sushi rice — in fact his techniques might be the reason that sushi in New York is not just all rolls, all the time. He arrived here in 1980 (he lives in Long Island City) and has been changing the food scene here ever since. When Pete Wells discovered Ichimura at Brushstroke, inside David Bouley’s restaurant on Hudson and Reade, in 2012, he could not contain his excitement — and didn’t: he gave it three stars. “When we moved on to nigiri,” he wrote, “and had our first taste of the rice — warm, fragrant and assertive — we understood that this was some of the most remarkable sashimi and sushi either of us had ever tasted.”

A couple of years ago, Ichimura was walking through the neighborhood, looking for his next (and last) restaurant space. There was one small spot on the stretch of Greenwich between Laight and Hubert just next to Saito’s l’abeille, so on his way to see it, he stopped in. Saito was a regular at Ichimura’s last spot, Uchu (also two Michelin stars), and was seated at the bar when he walked in. They surveyed the new space next door. (Saito, who speaks Japanese, would eventually expand his lease south; l’abeille à côté also opened that summer.)

“He said he was looking around for a new restaurant and so I asked if he wanted to do it together,” Saito said at the time. “I created this space to really have Chef Ichimura do his job the way he wants. It’s his last dance.”

The chef would sign each menu, each night of service, with a calligraphy brush. That’s it’s own quiet, perfect send-off.