Overview
History
Comfy for thirty years, until the demolition around it
Our old review called Barracuda a comfy, mellow gay bar without the cruise-or-die atmosphere, the kind of place you might even bring your straight friends. Bob Pontarelli founded it with his business partner, Stephen Heighton, and it opened in Chelsea in October 19951. Its weekly drag show, Star Search, was older than the bar: it began in 1991, and was later moved to Barracuda1.
Heighton died in 20111. In 2020 the promise was simply "Barracuda will open the second we can", and in June 2021 the bar announced it would reopen in two days, on June 111.
On March 17, 2025, Pontarelli announced that Barracuda would close for good on March 231. The reason was damage from a demolition project in the surrounding buildings1. It shuttered on schedule, after 30 years at 275 West 22nd Street, at Eighth Avenue1, 2.
Sources
Researched October 2026.