In December or January, In Former Gimchi
Sid-Mar's Seafood Restaurant
Will Reopen,
But Not In Bucktown
Sid-Mar's, the quintessential Bucktown restaurant for eating boiled and fried seafood before Hurricane Katrina blew it away, is reopening in about a month.
But not in Bucktown. Although the Burgess family, which owns the old place, is still in litigation over the expropriation of its Bucktown site for the building of a new pumping station, they've decided to reopen the restaurant in what will be a very different location.
The new Sid-Mar's will be where Gimchi has been for the past couple of years. Gimchi was a Korean and Japanese restaurant whose cooking and tabletop bulgoki grills were interesting enough to the gourmet. But not, apparently, to the mainstream. It never really caught on in Metairie.
The building has hosted a long parade of good restaurants over the years, including Archie and Danny's, Romanoff's, The Regency, the Butcher Shop, Chinese King, and India Palace. It's a nice-looking place, but its location just far enough off Veterans to be nearly invisible to Veterans traffic has been unhelpful.
Sid-Mar's opened in the early 1970s in the part of Bucktown immediately across from the spot on the 17th Street Canal where the fishing boats tied up. It was on the other sde of the levee, which gave it a lake view and an ambience that suggested that you were miles out on some bayou instead of on the edge of a heavily-populated suburb. It was casual even by the standards of its across-the-bridge neighbor West End Park. Many tables were busy peeling boiled crabs and crawfish in their seasons.
That spot as a restaurant location ceased to exist when the Army Corps of Engineers determined that a pumping station needed to be built right there, to prevent the kind of broken-levee disaster that occurred nearby after Katrina.
Still, lots of people wanted Sid-Mar's back. And now, here it is. Kent Burgess, who had managed the place before the storm, says that it should take about a month, but you never know when construction is in the schedule. But it's something to look forward to.
The new restaurant will have to make it entirely on the quality of its food. There's no question that much of the appeal of the old Sid-Mar's was the surroundings. The new spot is Anywhere, Metairie.