RESTAURANT ROUNDUP: SEABIRD TAKES FLIGHT

Look left. Look right. Shuttered doors of former favorite eateries litter the landscape like disposable masks across a drugstore parking lot.

Surely, no one would open a restaurant during a pandemic, right?

Dean Neff didn’t get that memo.

“There were a lot of things to consider, but moving forward with the restaurant – we never deviated from that idea,” Neff said. “We knew that it was going to happen.”

A James Beard-nominated chef, Neff arrived in Wilmington in 2015 and, along with partners, opened PinPoint Restaurant, one of downtown Wilmington’s better-known, higherend establishments. In 2019, he sold his shares of PinPoint and began setting his sights on his next venture.

That venture became Seabird, one of downtown Wilmington’s newest, most visible and, so far, busiest restaurants.

Located one block from the Riverwalk at 1 S. Front St., at the intersection with Market Street, Seabird boasts one of the most central addresses in town.

“I’ve always been drawn to downtown and historic buildings,” Neff said. “I’ve admired the building from afar for a long time and reached out to the owner (developer James A. Goodnight). We immediately hit it off. He was excited about having a restaurant in the building for the sake of having a lot of people coming through and being able to enjoy the space.”

FOLLOWING HIS NOSE

The olfactory system delivers its inputs to parts of the brain responsible for smell identification, memory and emotion. And anyone who has strolled along Wilmington’s Riverwalk or visited the region’s beach towns knows the distinct smells of one of the East Coast’s most-regarded seafood havens.

“I grew up on the coast,” Neff said. “As a young child, I was really obsessed with the ocean. Then I moved inland, and I worked in Atlanta and Athens, and then we moved to Asheville, so I was away from the water for a really significant portion of my career.

“The first thing that struck me about Wilmington was how much it reminded me of Savannah. There were these nostalgic smells and the humidity and being back near the ocean reminded me of my time growing up in Savannah.”

But much more than a nostalgic sort of homecoming went into Neff’s ultimate concept for what became Seabird.

“People always ask, ‘Where do we go to get local seafood?’” Neff said. “And there are places that serve great local seafood, but there was an opportunity to do a seasonal, seafoodcentric restaurant that focuses on local first; that highlights how the availability and abundance of all of these fish change, just like produce.

“It just became really clear that that was what this restaurant needed to be.”

A SWEET FAMILY

Neff consistently uses the word “we” when discussing the process of opening and running Seabird. Sometimes it is in reference to his landlord, Goodnight, whose efforts restored the building to its 1920s charm. Sometimes “we” means his team in the kitchen or front-of-house.

Most often, it refers to his wife – renowned pastry chef Lydia Clopton. But Seabird guests should not assume that Clopton’s creations await them after their final bites of the main course.

“People think that Lydia is doing all of the desserts, but it’s actually Jim Diecchio,” Neff said. “We’re using some of Lydia’s recipes like the coffee cake and the biscuits and things like that in the morning, but she has some other, more macro things that she’s doing in the restaurant day-to-day.”

The former executive chef at Vivian Howard’s Benny’s Big Time, Diecchio reached out as Neff neared Seabird’s opening.

“Jim said, ‘I’ve got some things I want to do down the road, but I’d love to come on board and help you out.’ So, I was really excited to have somebody with skills like that to join the team,” Neff said.

Diecchio’s addition rounded out the team Neff knows he is fortunate to have compiled, especially given the pandemic-era challenges that have left so many restaurants understaffed.

“I can’t say enough good things about how well this restaurant opened,” Neff said. “It’s not one person that does that. It is a group of people that all care about what they’re doing. Everyone is just taking a lot of pride in what they do. It’s been really cool to see that part of everything come together.

“We tend to take people that want to stay in a place for a while, whether that’s a year or 10 years, and then we try to pay the best that we can to get people to feel like they are appreciated; to show them that we are partners with them and not trying to work people into a place that’s unsustainable for them.”

Sustainably farmed seafood and ingredients are at the heart of Neff’s kitchen creations and creating a sustainable environment for himself, his family and his team are part of his vision for making Seabird a staple on the Wilmington culinary scene.

And he knows it starts with him.

“I’m really stepping into all areas,” Neff said. “It would be negligent for me to be working the 16-hour days, mincing onions in the back all day. It’s a process of stepping into the next level of my career and being able to create teams of people that can really work well together and bring together great people that have the same passions and that are all about making great food and providing great service. People who care.”

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