A three-story French Quarter building that has sat empty since 2019 is being brought back into commerce as Holywater, a seafood restaurant and oyster bar from New York hospitality group Crew, now targeting a mid-September opening at 622 Conti Street. The address sits between Royal and Chartres streets, directly across Conti from the Louisiana Supreme Court building, in one of the densest commercial blocks of the Quarter. The space has been dark since the dessert boutique and restaurant Salon by Sucre closed there seven years ago.

Crew is run by brothers Alex and Miles Pincus, New Orleans natives with deep family roots in the local hospitality business who built their company in New York. The group operates roughly a half-dozen concepts there, several of them on historic sailing vessels, and has developed a reputation for design-driven settings and a heavy emphasis on oysters. The New Orleans project marks their return to the market where they grew up, though not their first local work: the brothers brought Seaworthy to the Ace Hotel and have recently resumed consulting on it at the new Barnett hotel.

The restaurant shares a name and some DNA with a Crew property in New York, a subterranean bar that has drawn attention for its design and its oyster program, and which already runs a current of New Orleans influence through its menu from Sazeracs to gumbo. The Conti Street version reverses that flow. Oysters and cocktails will anchor the operation, with a dedicated oyster bar plus fruits de mer towers, caviar, burgers, fried chicken, lobster rolls, charbroiled lobster frites, and gumbo on the menu.

To run the kitchen, Alex Pincus recruited Alex Harrell, a veteran of the New Orleans dining scene whose résumé includes Sylvain, his own restaurant Angeline, the Elysian Bar, and most recently the Gloriette in Covington. The hire gives an out-of-market operator a well-established local name at the top of the kitchen, a pattern that has become common among national and regional groups entering the New Orleans restaurant market.

The project has taken longer than initially planned. Renovations were underway by March, when the opening was projected for later that spring; the current target is mid-September, a slip of roughly five months. Buildout plans include a third-floor lounge and event space that could eventually host live music, adding an income stream beyond the ground-floor dining room and giving the operator a use for the upper floors of a building that has historically been difficult to program.

For the Quarter’s commercial corridor, the reactivation matters more than the concept. A prominent three-story building at a high-visibility corner has generated no rent and no foot traffic for seven years, in a submarket where street-level vacancy has drawn increasing attention from property owners and the Downtown Development District alike. Holywater joins a run of Quarter and CBD restaurant activity this year that includes the incoming sushi and hibachi operator at the former Tsunami space at 601 Poydras and Armada, the Isaac and Amanda Toups project taking the ground floor of the former Cotton Exchange Building at 231 Carondelet Street.

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