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Jim Wasko initially thought the reconstruction of the Crab Cooker would have taken a year, or maybe as long as 18 months, back when he shut down the iconic Newport Beach seafood restaurant in 2018 and it went under the wrecking ball.
Instead, it’s taken nearly three years, Wasko said in an interview Friday, to give the venerable restaurant its sea legs once again. Plumbing issues caused an eight-month delay that involved an intensive re-engineering of the restaurant’s foundation in 2019. Then Wasko had to deal with the arrival of the pandemic shortly afterward.
“We couldn’t have more than 10 people on a job [at one time],” Wasko said of the construction work last year. “Everything had to be spaced out. You could have guys on the roof, but you couldn’t have people in the same vicinity [because of social distancing]. With a year of that . and we’re still being affected of it to some extent, some of it’s loosened up, but it was kind of a double whammy.”