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The recently rebuilt Crab Cooker Restaurant and Fish Market will officially throw open its doors to welcome guests back to the landmark Newport Beach eatery at 11 a.m. on Monday.
Located at 2200 Newport Blvd., the Crab Cooker first started serving customers 70 years ago. Its former building was heavily damaged by nearby construction, so the owner, Jim Wasko, son-in-law of founder Bob Roubian (1926 – 2017), took it down and started all over again recreating it.
“We have gone to painstaking detail to preserve the look, feel and even the décor,” Wasko said in a news release issued Friday. “When we reopen return visitors will feel right at home and new visitors will feel as if they did not miss a thing.”
Landmark Newport Beach Restaurant to Reopen in July
NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. One of Newport Beach’s oldest seafood restaurants is set to reopen in July after almost three years of construction to rebuild the iconic red building.
Crab Cooker is known for its casual atmosphere, serving up premium seafood and homemade specialties such as smoked fish and its famous clam chowders served on disposable plates.
The Balboa Peninsula building, formerly home to a Bank of America, was originally erected in 1938, and has been home of the Crab Cooker since 1951.
In 2014, the historic restaurant’s foundation was severely damaged due to the construction of an adjacent condominium project. he damage was so extensive that the expense to fix it made rebuilding a better option for Crab Cooker owner, Jim Wasko, and his family. They made the decision to demolish and rebuild the building instead of trying to renovate.
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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.”