Imagine confirming a dinner reservation the night before, driving in from the suburbs, and showing up to find the restaurant closed with its sign GONE.
That is what appears to have happened at Miku, the Japanese restaurant inside Richmond’s River Rock Casino, which has quietly and suddenly shut down.
Several Noms Mag community members flagged an Instagram story from hintofgrey, who said she had a reservation at the River Rock location and even got the usual confirmation text the day before.
When she arrived for the booking, the restaurant was not just closed, it had been emptied out, with no email or call to warn her.
She added that friends had driven in from Maple Ridge, over an hour away.
The digital footprint backs that up.
The Miku Richmond website has been set to private, its Instagram page is gone, and OpenTable has now paused bookings for the restaurant.
We went by to check for ourselves.
The large Miku sign that used to sit behind the host desk is gone, though the dining room otherwise looked unmoved.
While we were there, a group of tourists turned up hoping to eat but left disappointed when they realized it was closed.
A security guard and buffet staff at River Rock did not seem to know the restaurant had shut.
The front desk told us that Miku was under renovation, but when we mentioned the missing sign, the private website, and the deleted Instagram, the staffer said she did not know.
Miku is the flagship Japanese brand from Aburi Restaurants Canada, and the River Rock spot was announced as Miku’s second Metro Vancouver location after the original Coal Harbour restaurant from 2008.
It had a long road to begin with, soft opening on February 17 after originally being slated for last summer.
But the trouble for this location appears to predate the closure.
Back in April, an alleged former staffer wrote in a now-deleted Threads post that her time at Miku Richmond was “the beginning of a nightmare.”
In that post, she claimed the Richmond outpost is a franchise location run by the same owners as another Richmond Chinese restaurant that alleged had owed employees money, and that her own wages were delayed three times and tips were withheld.
A recent Google reviewer also claimed Miku Richmond is not affiliated with the same Aburi brand as the downtown original despite the identical branding.
Other reviews from the past few days describe the same scramble hintofgrey did, with some getting no notice at all and one saying a cancellation landed just 12 minutes before their booking.
Google now lists the River Rock location as temporarily closed.
With the sign down, the website private, and the Instagram deleted, it is fair to wonder whether it comes back at all.
But given how much went into this long-delayed launch and the pride of Miku’s name as one of BC’s success stories, I wouldn’t be surprised if they turn this around by taking it over internally.
Time will tell what happens, though.
Miku River Rock joins a list of recently closed Richmond food spots, including Pepper Lunch, Hey Yearn, and Bubble Queen.
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Address: River Rock Casino Resort, Richmond, BC