Bob VitaleColumbus Dispatch
Think of Del Mar, the latest Cameron Mitchell restaurant that's set to open in Columbus on June 11, as a snowbird coming north. After two and a half years on Florida's Gulf Coast, it's incredibly relaxed and has a really, really nice tan.
The Columbus restaurant guru flipped his company's usual script for the opening of Del Mar, a Mediterranean-style seafood restaurant at Easton Town Center. Mitchell's 101st restaurant comes here by way of Naples, Florida, where it debuted in December of 2021.
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What his hometown gets from the start, then, is a menu that has been tested, refined and proven with customers in an area where seafood is abundant and expectations are high.
"We did a little revamp to the menu … to get it right where we wanted it to be as we got ready for this," said Ian Rough, a corporate chef for Cameron Mitchell Restaurants who oversees kitchens for two of the company's seafood-focused concepts. "We normally don't open up new concepts outside of Columbus. We always start here."
A seafood renaissance
Del Mar is the second southern seafood restaurant to expand into Columbus this spring. In April, Hank's Low Country Seafood & Raw Bar opened its first location outside Charleston, South Carolina, at High and Gay streets in Downtown. Hank's is owned by Columbus-based Rockbridge, a real-estate and hospitality investment firm.
The two restaurants take different directions with their menus, but both start with fresh fish and shellfish that shine no matter how they're prepared.
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At Del Mar, those preparations include influences that span the Mediterranean, from Spain to the Middle East.
"We literally had this map on the kitchen table. We wanted to make sure we hit this swath of everything around the Mediterranean," Rough said. "We didn’t want just a Spanish restaurant. We didn’t want just an Italian restaurant. We didn’t want just a Greek restaurant. We peppered in all these little flavors, spices, cooking techniques, ingredients."
The result isn't nearly as disparate as it sounds. Olive oil, olives, lemon and other citrus, tomatoes and peppers are common threads that run through the cuisines of Spain, Morocco, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Syria and other Mediterranean countries.
Even ingredients and sauces associated with specific places — Greek feta, Middle Eastern labneh, Italian gremolata, Spanish romesco — seem part of a whole.
What is it like inside Del Mar?
Del Mar took over the former Bon Vie bistro, which closed in 2020. The building has been renovated and expanded into a more substantial presence among the high-end retailers that ring Easton's central park fountain; it now has two floors of dining, two bars, two private dining rooms, a patio and exterior terraces.
The first-floor dining room has a Florida vibe, but not in a Jimmy Buffett, 5-o'clock-somewhere kind of way. The work of Cameron Mitchell design director Randy Roberty, with the Columbus-based Design Collective and Chicago's Studio K Creative, is more old-school tropical with mango wood, tan earth tones, terra cotta, rattan, lush greenery and soft lighting. Upstairs is brighter with large windows and a vaulted ceiling.
Del Mar in Naples occupies a spot on the city's historic Fifth Avenue South. Although Easton can't match its palm trees and expansive upstairs terrace, it does seem to replicate that vacation feeling of sitting down for a relaxing dinner after a hard day of relaxing at the beach.
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What's on the menu?
There's more than seafood on Del Mar's menus, but it's definitely a seafood restaurant. Its name, after all, means of the sea.
Raw oysters and a jumbo shrimp co*cktail top the cold menu, and they're hard to pass up. But the three cold starters — yellowfin tuna tartare, salmon crudo and red-snapper ceviche — are impossible to ignore.
Mellow salmon and avocado in the crudo get light punches of flavor from pickled fennel, scallion and lemon oil. Bits of orange and pickled red onion lift the ceviche.
The roasted shellfish platter might be Del Mar's signature dish (and is priced accordingly at $68 or $130, depending on the size). The dish is South African lobster tail, scallops, prawns, clams and mussels roasted with entire heads of garlic, halved lemons and heirloom tomatoes that burst into an herbed butter sauce.
It comes to the table covered in grape leaves, and the whole dish is served with plenty of toasty bread for sopping up the juices.
Other seafood entrees include lobster spaghetti, whole roasted branzino and sea bass served with an heirloom tomato broth, fennel confit and citrus labneh.
The non-del mar menu features a veal chop served with sherry cipollini onions, wild mushrooms and serrano ham; a roasted half-chicken with curried carrots; steaks; and a full- or half-rack of lamb tagine that comes with a roasted chili lemon relish.
If you go
Where: Del Mar, 4089 The Strand East, Easton Town Center; delmarmediterranean.com.
Hours: 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Fridays, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sundays. Happy hours are from 4 to 6 p.m. weekdays.
By the way, don't confuse the new Del Mar with the Cameron Mitchell restaurant in the Short North that used to be called Del Mar SoCal Kitchen. The latter, which has a more casual, California-inspired menu, was renamed SoCal Kitchen + Bar in January.
rvitale@dispatch.com
Instagram: @dispatchdining
