By Wednesday evening, the dining room at 1944 Bayberry Avenue in Merrick was set for a party of 125 people. Four days earlier, there had been three and a half feet of bay water where the tables now stood.

Fabio's on the Water, the Italian restaurant at the end of Bayberry Avenue where south Merrick meets the canals, is open again after the nor'easter that battered the South Shore over the last weekend of September. The turnaround took four days, and the deadline was not arbitrary. A party had been booked, the hosts were counting on the room, and the restaurant decided the party was going to happen.

Four tides, four floods

The storm did not hit the restaurant once. It hit it four separate times. Between Saturday and Sunday, as the nor'easter stalled offshore and stacked one high tide on top of another, water flowed into the building, drained out, and came back again with the next cycle. South Shore residents saw the same rhythm all weekend in Freeport, Baldwin Harbor, Bellmore and Seaford: streets that cleared by afternoon and were underwater again by night.

Owner Fabio Giambanco has said the flooding caught him off guard, and his reasoning says a lot about how storm-smart South Shore business owners have had to become. A nor'easter blows from the northeast, and on his stretch of water that wind usually pushes the tide away from the building, not into it. This storm broke the pattern. By the time the water finished its fourth visit, roughly three and a half feet had moved through the restaurant.

The toll came to about $150,000. Kitchen equipment was ruined, electrical systems were knocked out, and sheetrock, tables and chairs soaked through. Saltwater is the part that worries any waterfront owner most, because what it starts corroding this week it finishes months from now.

This room has come back from worse

Longtime Merrick residents know this building has a history with water, and a much darker chapter of it. The restaurant opened in 2012 as AcQua, run by brothers Fabio and Francesco Giambanco, and it had been serving dinner for roughly three months when Superstorm Sandy arrived. That flood was nearly five feet deep. It wrecked the dining room, the kitchen and the electrical systems, and it carried about 30 boats into and around the property. The brothers spent the better part of a year rebuilding and held a grand reopening in August 2013.

So the math on this comeback is worth sitting with. Sandy took the restaurant down for roughly nine months. This storm took it down for four days.

Part of that is the difference between five feet of water with boats in it and three and a half feet without. But part of it is a crew that has done this before and knew exactly what the first 72 hours had to look like: haul out the ruined equipment, dry the floors and carpets, test what the saltwater touched, and work backward from a Wednesday deadline. By Tuesday the restaurant was a construction site. By Wednesday it was a restaurant.

The name on the door

If you have not been down Bayberry Avenue in a few years, the name may throw you. The brothers renamed AcQua as Fabio's on the Water in late 2023, keeping the waterfront room, the Italian menu and the party business that has long been the building's engine. The restaurant maintains two private rooms that together hold events of up to 150 people, which is why a booked party of 125 was never going to be a small thing to cancel.

That party is also the detail that makes this a Merrick story rather than just a storm story. Anyone who has planned a big family event on Long Island knows the particular dread of watching a forecast the week before it. Somewhere in Merrick, a host spent the weekend assuming the venue call was coming. It never came.

What it means for the neighborhood

The South Shore will be tallying this nor'easter for a while. Beaches lost sand from Gilgo to Montauk, the Long Beach branch of the LIRR spent days suspended, and a burger spot up in central Merrick, open barely two months, is still closed from the same flooding and working toward its own comeback.

Fabio's reopening does not undo any of that. What it offers is the first proof on the board that this particular storm gets to be a story places tell, not an ending. The restaurant is back on its fall schedule, the water is back where it belongs, and a room that has now survived the two worst floods in its lifetime is open for dinner on the canal tonight.