St. Roch Fine Oysters + Bar Reopening Wednesday

Oyster lovers in the Triangle have one more reason to celebrate this week. On Wednesday, St. Roch Fine Oysters + Bar will officially reopen for business.

After surviving temporary closings and restricted service during the pandemic, owner Sunny Gerhart was hit with a double whammy this summer when a kitchen fire swept through his downtown Raleigh restaurant and forced it to close for months of repairs.

“This has been a tough year,” Gerhart said in a statement, “and it was especially frustrating to have to close for the summer because of a fire after we’d worked so hard to stay open throughout the pandemic.”

Owner Sunny Gerhart pays homage to his native New Orleans at St. Roch Fine Oysters + Bar in Raleigh (Anna Routh Barzin/St. Roch)

In addition to repairing the damage, Gerhart and team used the opportunity to give St. Roch a thorough overhaul. He engaged interior designer Jamie Meares of Furbish Studio and Kilt Creative to rethink the space and make it reflect the personal story of the Louisiana-born owner. That includes custom-designed wallpaper by local artist Luke Buchanan and large photographs of Gerhart’s father along with new nautical lighting and seascape paintings.

Matt Lardie, one of the Dispatch’s Triangle correspondents, got a sneak preview of the new St. Roch decor over the weekend, and he describes it as “very French Quarter gothic,” complete with black wooden church pews and deep banquettes. “It’s like if an oyster bar was also a cathedral,” he reports.

The redesign includes a brand new oyster bar (here at the Southeastern Dispatch we are pretty keen on oyster bar design) that will offer the same New Orleans-meets-North Carolina fare that won St. Roch much acclaim when it opened in 2017. (Greg Cox of the News & Observer declared it “an oysters lover’s paradise” in his four-star review.)

That means all the old favorites are coming back, including the gator Bolognese, the Tchoupitoulas Street Special (18 oysters, a quarter pound peel 'n eat North Carolina shrimp, and blue crab claws), and St. Roch’s spin on New Orleans’s classic BBQ shrimp, which gets a novel dose of coconut broth.

Starting Wednesday, St. Roch will be open for dinner seven days a week with brunch on Saturdays and Sundays.