Buffa’s Bar and Restaurant, the beloved institution that hosted countless musicians and performers since 1939, has announced it will close this week. Tucked away at the edge of the Quarter on Esplanade and Burgundy, the business was purchased from the Buffa family—the original owners—in 2010. Current owners Chuck Rogers and Christy Bagley reported rising rents and a lack of tourists have contributed to the establishment’s financial instability.

In 2020, OffBeat covered Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s permitting process for live music during the height of the COVID pandemic. Chuck shared an open letter with OffBeat, expressing his appreciation in her faith in live music, but frustration with the process of obtaining a permit. Rogers wrote,  “While we are grateful for the opportunity to resume live indoor music, we are frustrated, along with musicians and many other venue owners that the mayor would make it clear live indoor music is allowed with special permits and then provide no clear path for obtaining them. We’ve been in phase 3.2 since 10/17, and the city is poised to go into phase 3.3 soon — but we still have no idea how to restart live music with the city’s blessing, despite guidelines that say we can.”

This was a heavy blow for the venue who has done its best to cooperate with city ordinances and noise issues over the years. Red tape has been no stranger to Mr. Rogers. In 2014, Buffa’s faced off against prominent New Orleans businessman Sidney Torres IV for allegedly violating the city’s noise ordinance. The lawsuit, filed by 1011 Esplanade Avenue, Inc., a property owned by Torres, tried to strip Buffa’s of its Mayoralty Permit, which serves as a live music permit in Orleans Parish. (OffBeat even documented Rogers’s attempts at soundproofing to accommodate Torres’s requests.) For Rogers, it was simply an issue of being “neighborly,” even though other residents had claimed Torres spent most of his time at a property in the Bahamas instead of in the house adjacent to the cozy dive bar.

Prior to being purchased by Vincent Buffa Sr. in December of 1939, the bar originally was a pharmacy. Chuck Rogers, the current owner, has been leasing the building from Vincent’s sons with his own three children: Adam, Jarret and Cary. New Orleans lore alleges that the establishment was once a mob bar that even has a secret look-out window.

This is an ongoing story and will be updated.