IOU Sushi III, the all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant at 4280 North Oracle Road, Suite 180, in Tucson, Arizona, has closed. The owners announced the news September 29, and the restaurant’s own website now states that it is permanently closed and no longer accepting orders.
Tucson Foodie’s October 12 report brought fresh local coverage to the announcement. The owners thanked customers for roughly a decade of support and did not give a reason for the closure.
The restaurant opened at the end of January 2017 as IOU Sushi IV, the fourth location in a business then owned by Boise-based Rocky Holden. His cousin, Gerner Poll, ran the Tucson restaurant, according to Tucson Foodie’s original visit that year. The name later changed to IOU Sushi III.
That early coverage described a tucked-away, 53-seat restaurant near Oracle Road and Limberlost Drive, with made-to-order rolls, nigiri, temaki and maki. Its menu gave familiar sushi preparations an island accent, with house sweet sauce turning up across several dishes.
The upside down shrimp nigiri paired tempura shrimp with green onions, sriracha and sweet sauce. The IOU Roll combined salmon, cream cheese and jalapeños; a teriyaki chicken roll arrived under a covering of thinly sliced avocado. These were dishes with a recognizable personality, well suited to ordering another round.
The name had its own island connection. The restaurant’s website explains that IOU is pronounced “e-yo” and means “delicious, tasty, sweet” in the Pohnpeian language, from Pohnpei in Micronesia.
The site’s remaining AYCE information lists adult lunch at $22.99, dinner at $30.99 and dinner with sashimi at $34.99. Those are its last publicly displayed prices, rather than a new offer. They also differ from the $18.99 lunch and $25.99 dinner documented during the 2017 visit.
The announcement leaves the reason for the shutdown unstated, but the status is clear. A small Oracle Road dining room that built its identity around repeat sushi orders has finished its run, taking its particular sweet-sauce-and-tempura corner of Tucson’s AYCE scene with it.
