Hamburger Mary’s is now open in the Uptown Theater

Over year after first announcing that they were moving their restaurant, Hamburger Mary’s is out of the big purple building at 101 Southwest Boulevard and into the space formerly occupied by the Conspiracy Room in the Uptown Theater at the corner of Broadway and Valentine Road.

Restaurant owners Jeff Edmondson and Erik Christensen opened the doors to the venue — now bigger, pinker and noisier than the original incarnation — a week ago.

Because there was a printing error with the new menus ordered for the restaurant (something to do with fonts, or something like that), the new Hamburger Mary’s is still, temporarily, using the old menus, which still include a couple of dishes that executive chef Wade DeYoung plans to discontinue. But Edmondson says most of the former menu will remain intact: big burgers, lots of deep-fried snacks, meatloaf, and chicken-fried chicken smothered in gravy.

The restaurant space has been carved out of former retail storefronts on the southern half of the 86-year-old movie house (which opened January 6, 1928, with The Irresistible Lover) and has been painted in tones of lilac and rose. There’s a good-sized stage in the dining room for the restaurant’s popular bingo games, drag brunch, and weekend performances by local drag artists and a few of the restaurant’s employees.

Edmondson says there were several reasons that he and Christensen decided to move the five-year-old restaurant out of the Crossroads: “The building on Southwest Boulevard had issues that were very cost-prohibitive for us to fix,” Edmondson says. “But the Crossroads is really turning into more of a fine-dining destination. We had a great fanbase, but our revenues were not growing.”

Hamburger Mary’s is now open seven days a week with the kitchen serving food from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.