St. Roch Fine Oysters + Bar is Raleigh’s go-to for cliche-free New Orleans cuisine. Familiar dishes bring surprising flavors; the food doesn’t always do what you expect, and that’s no accident. Sunny Gerhart, chef and owner, is hard to pin down. He’s a milieux - an intense blend of intuition and experience. In that way, he’s a bit like New Orleans, the city that raised him. Hard to describe; easy to taste.
Sunny grew up on St. Roch Avenue, across from St. Roch Park and St. Roch Cemetery. When Sunny spikes Louisiana dishes with far-flung flavors it’s instinctive, not contrived - a reflection of where he’s from and where he’s been. The area’s vibrant West African, Caribbean, and Vietnamese communities enrich The Crescent City and, along with Spanish, Italian, and French traditions, inspire the menu at St. Roch.
He and his family relocated to North Carolina where he attended high school and college. An off-syllabus book would change his life at ECU: Wine for Dummies. Thirsty to learn more, Sunny immersed himself in the world of wine. He worked at different wine shops and spent two months living in a tent at a California winery. He kept focused on learning and lived on a sailboat, waited tables and cleaned boat bottoms to get by.
A death in the family brought Sunny close to his mother in Baltimore. She saw the new passion simmering in her son. Since cooking for friends and working at restaurants seemed to light him up, she convinced him to go to culinary school. He wasn’t convinced at first, but from day one, something big clicked into place. Sunny was all in.
After graduation, he began work at Enoteca Vin and met James Beard award-winning chef Ashley Christensen. Christensen became Sunny’s mentor, and brought him onto the team that opened Poole’s Diner in 2007, and the coffee shop/restaurant concept, Joule, a few years later. The concept didn’t stick but Sunny did. In 2017 the business became St. Roch — so named for the patron saint of good health, bachelors, dogs, and his namesake New Orleans neighborhood.
Sunny and St. Roch walk the line between homage and sacrilege. He’s not one to alter his tread — or his cooking — to suit someone else’s expectations. Good-hearted yet unapologetic, he keeps his focus on the food, his team and the community he has grown to love.
(919) 322-0359
