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Sansei Seafood Restaurant & Sushi Bar plans to close its Kihei Town Center restaurant and move a mile away to Kukui Mall next year, owner DK Restaurants has announced.
The contemporary Japanese restaurant has been open since 2002 and is among a chain of four restaurants in Hawaii and one in Seattle.
Hugh Kodama, new chief operations officer for the restaurant group, said the new site will be slightly larger, and the facilities, menu and service will be “refreshed” to maintain Sansei’s upscale reputation.
There are no other plans for renovation or expansion of the other Sansei restaurants, added Kodama, a retired health care administrator in Tacoma, Wash., who will commute to Hawaii for his duties in the company his brother D.K. Kodama owns.
The aim is to open in mid-2019, with the new Sansei occupying most of the free-standing building on the north side of Kukui Mall, at 1819 S. Kihei Road.
The mall recently was acquired by Houle Financial Corp.
The first Sansei opened in March 1996 at the Kapalua Resort on Maui. It has additional locations in Honolulu, Kihei, Waikoloa on the Big Island and Seattle.
State agency seeks dismissal of challenge
The state Attorney General’s Office filed papers in federal court Monday to dismiss the state’s challenge to President Donald Trump’s travel ban, after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the latest version of the ban.
Hawaii was one of the first states to challenge the ban as discriminatory since the affected countries are mostly Muslim.
The Supreme Court said in June that ban was within a president’s authority over immigration and responsibility for keeping the nation safe.
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