Resilient Raleigh oyster bar is reopening after a fire. There are new twists on the menu
Four months ago, from his house on the west side of downtown Raleigh, Sunny Gerhart could hear the fire engines blaring in the middle of the night. His phone was blowing up with calls, and he hoped against hope the two weren’t connected.
They were. St. Roch Fine Oysters+Bar, his restaurant of four years, was on fire.
“It was a very scary and surreal experience,” Gerhart said. “I remember thinking, ‘I hope that’s not going to my restaurant.’ And it was.”
A reach-in cooler had overheated and caught fire, the flames crawling under the floor, eventually reaching the stove and hood system and lighting the grease that inevitably builds up over time. That’s when the fire took off.
There was no structural damage, Gerhart said, but equipment had been ruined by smoke and water and the fire burned some of the kitchen floor.
Fire crews extinguished the blaze quickly, Gerhart said, but the restaurant seemed to have avoided the worst.
“I was thinking, ‘I wonder if we can get someone to clean it up and open that night,’” Gerhart said. “But there was a lot of stuff we couldn’t clean.”
With the power to St. Roch turned off, Gerhart sat with his restaurant the rest of that night, the dining room and kitchen empty and dark, waiting in case some hot spot flared up again and the disconnected fire alarm couldn’t scream for help.
“It was pretty significant fire and water damage, even if it’s just cosmetic,” Gerhart said. “Thankfully nobody was hurt and the building was OK. I love this space; they don’t build them like this anymore.”
After 20 weeks away, St. Roch will reopen its doors Wednesday, lighting the stoves and shucking oysters for the first time since the spring. The absence of St. Roch has left downtown Raleigh without one of its most unique restaurants, a menu built on New Orleans and Louisiana classics, by way of the North Carolina coast.
“It’s nice to be back,” Gerhart said.
St. Roch opened in 2017, replacing Ashley Christensen’s coffee shop Joule at 223 S. Wilmington St. Gerhart had been the opening sous chef at Christensen’s Poole’s Diner a decade earlier. When former News & Observer dining critic Greg Cox first reviewed it, St. Roch earned four stars and was praised as “an oyster lover’s paradise.”
The pandemic closing
Like many restaurants in 2020, St. Roch closed its dining room for months at the beginning of the pandemic. Oyster bars are hard to run as to-go operations, but St. Roch pivoted to sandwiches and offered delivery for the first time. The dining room reopened in June 2020 after three months closed, and continued to pick up steam through the spring of 2021, as North Carolina’s COVID situation ebbed and flowed.
By May, Gerhart said St. Roch was better than ever.
“We were killing it before the fire,” Gerhart said. “We had worked so hard before the fire and were getting busier and busier and having a great time.”
St. Roch’s fire pressed pause on a restaurant beginning to catch up to pre-pandemic momentum. Gerhart suddenly had a kitchen crew needing jobs and no idea when St. Roch could return.
“The worst part was all of a sudden I have people who are out of work and I don’t have answers for them,” he said.
Gerhart said equipment and construction delays stretched from weeks to months, but the reopening falls at a meaningful time. On Sept. 20, Gerhart marked three years of sobriety, a milestone he sees in the evolution of the restaurant, in St. Roch’s refining itself with each service.
“The last three years I’ve been struggling and working and figuring things out and getting better. And at this point I feel so great and have learned so much,” Gerhart said. “This is just another challenge.”
The new St. Roch menu
The reopened St. Roch will serve a familiar menu for fans of the restaurant before the fire. Oysters are still the heart of the restaurant, with varieties coming from the east and west coasts and an emphasis on those from North Carolina’s waters. There’s a new roasted oyster with crawfish and spicy salami, joining other options like pimento cheese, barbecue and garlic butter.
Gerhart said St. Roch will lean more into the New Orleans classics, like gumbo and jambalaya, instead of trying to reinvent them. But the gumbo is now served on potato salad, instead of rice, bringing a great Louisiana debate to Raleigh.
“People are always a little hesitant to go for gumbo with potato salad, but it’s absolutely one of my favorite things,” Gerhart said. “It’s so good.”
St. Roch is also expanding its pasta program, adding a new bucatini dish with shrimp, olives, capers and crawfish butter and the sleeper hit gator bolognese is now served over sweet potato gnocchi. Other dishes include a tried and true rendition of red beans and rice, buttery barbecue shrimp with a coconut broth and hushpuppies with crawfish tails.
“We were hesitant to do some of these dishes, because if you want to have traditional New Orleans food, there’s really no other place than New Orleans,” Gerhart said. “But as we refocus we’re trying to embrace those dishes a little more, staying authentic but with our take on them.”
Never giving up
Part of the pause meant St. Roch could take a beat and put itself back together, to undo some of the inertia that comes from a restaurant being open nearly every night for years. That includes a new floor in the kitchen and new equipment, as well as a refinished dining room floor that gleams.
“When I bought the restaurant it had some years on it,” Gerhart said. “I inherited a bunch of stuff that it would have been too expensive to shut down and redo. Restaurants are hard on everything, including people. So we’re sort of fortunate to be able to get some things done that we needed to change and improve.”
Even though he didn’t know when the doors might reopen, Gerhart said closing was never an option. St. Roch and nearly every other restaurant struggled under the hardest year restaurants have seen in decades. Gerhart said that’s all the more reason to keep going.
“Failure is scary, but you learn from it,” Gerhart said. “That’s how you really grow. If you just give up, you’re never going to see that growth.”
