April Spears, who lost Auntie April's and Cafe Envy to the pandemic, has registered Bayview Oyster Bar at 5114 Third St. — a grant-backed seafood room, and her return to the corridor she grew up on.

April Spears is coming back to Third Street. The Bayview native has registered Bayview Oyster Bar at 5114 Third St., the storefront of a café that COVID shuttered in 2021, and it will be the fourth restaurant she has opened in the neighborhood she grew up in. The City's business registry lists the room under Auntie April's Pop Up Shops LLC, with a registration date of June 30. An opening date has not been set.

The name carries weight on the corridor. Spears ran Auntie April's — registered at 4618 Third St. back in 2008 — for roughly 15 years on fried chicken and waffles, then opened the cocktail spot Cafe Envy. Both closed in the wake of the pandemic, part of an uneven stretch for a historically Black neighborhood that saw sales-tax revenue fall 31 percent between 2019 and 2025, according to the San Francisco Chronicle's Becky Duffett, who first reported the new room.

The concept is the news. Spears told the Chronicle the Bayview has always had its soul food — the catfish, the oxtails, the turkey wings — "but we have to go outside of the community to get fresh seafood, so I wanted to bring something different to the corridor." She traces the cooking to grandparents and godparents who migrated from the South to work at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard; her godmother, Margine Miller, ran J&M's Soul Food at Third and Palou.

Bayview Oyster Bar is one of a cluster of restaurants the City is helping open along Third Street with grant money, a program The Dissent has tracked through the D10 Community Pharmacy and the planned Chapter 3 bookstore-café. Seat count and pricing aren't yet on the record. What is: an operator who lost two rooms here is betting a third that the corridor's own comeback is real.