Beard or Bust: Wilmington's Bardea
On a dark train ride home from New York in March 2013—just a few hours after hanging behind-the-scenes at the iconic James Beard House, the prestigious Greenwich Village home of the James Beard Foundation and typically reserved for the culinary world’s highest rung—Scott Stein’s vision came into focus.
“The experience, I remember it so specifically,” Stein says today. It was a whirlwind night under the wing of longtime chef-friend Jay Caputo. Caputo, the decorated Delaware beach-area chef who won fans at Espuma in Rehoboth Beach and a handful of other eateries, had been invited to cook at the historic Beard House, which invites celebrity chefs from around the country to cook for exclusive, high-ticket dinners that raise money for various charitable efforts. As backstage guests of Caputo, Stein and his friend and fellow chef Antimo DiMeo saw at Beard what the top echelon of culinary talent could produce. To DiMeo, Stein uttered three prophetic words: “Beard or bust.”
Back home, the experience motivated them from their Ardé Osteria in suburban Wayne, Pennsylvania, which was quickly earning a reputation for artfully blending upscale and neighborhood-style Italian dining. Fast forward to February 2019. Having sold his stake in Ardé to open Bardea, a new Italian eatery in blossoming Downtown Wilmington— Stein and the Beard Foundation cross paths again.
On his morning commute, he received a text message from Caputo that caused him veer off the interstate.
“Congratulations, bro,” it read. “You actually did it. Beard, baby!”
Stein pulled over in a state of shock and retrieved his phone. “I opened up the James Beard newsletter, and I saw us on there and I was in shock. I was shaking,” he says. Bardea had been nominated in the Best New Restaurant category by the Beard Foundation, whose annual awards are akin to the Oscars for restaurants. Only 30 restaurants in the U.S. made the cut. “It was like our fate,” Stein says. “It’s pretty magical.”
The news sent shockwaves that reverberated throughout northern New Castle County. Just five months into its existence, Bardea (incidentally an anagram for “a Beard”) had already jolted Wilmington’s Market Street renaissance. It delivered like a perfectly calibrated afterburner, boosting the downtown area’s profile just as city officials continued to rehab its image into a more vibrant, livable, modern urban center.
Led by a small group of developers, politicians, and city advocates, Wilmington’s reinvention has been a decades-spanning, multimillion-dollar project. Downtown, the Market Street corridor is flanked by Fortune 500 companies, financial-tech giants, and law offices, making it a workday hub for a richly diverse cast of commuting professionals and locals.
After years of ups and downs, the street finally earned some hard-won culinary and cultural victories—thanks in large part to titanic investments from development giants The Buccini/Pollin Group and others. Bryan Sikora’s La Fia opened in 2013 and brought Beard-level talent and big-city buzz to a forgotten section of the street. Just last year, Dan Sheridan’s Stitch House Brewery furnished the district with the Millennial hangout of its dreams, with rotating house microbrews and soulfully modern bar food. Meanwhile, new and rehabbed properties flooded local apartment listings, while the city worked on practical improvements like parking and safety, and launched a raft of marketing campaigns.
If skeptics remained, Bardea’s success—and major outside validation— was making their case harder.
“We just feel the energy is changing on the street,” says executive chef DiMeo, who trained on the Amalfi Coast at a two-time Michelin Star-winning restaurant. “We’re just happy and proud to be able to bring in such a nomination for the town because, honestly, without the neighborhood we’re really nobody, and we’ve had supporters since day one.”
One such supporter is Wilmington’s 3rd District Council Member Zanthia Oliver, a native and lifelong resident of the city. She’s been to Bardea at least four times since it opened, ordering a favorite whole red snapper, which chef DiMeo brines, coats in a secret blend of spices, and bakes in a hot oven.
“Bardea is modern. It gives me that upscale Philly or New York feeling,” Oliver says. “And the food is phenomenal. It’s like old school but new school.”
The menu is what DiMeo calls global Italian. “At our core, we’re an Italian restaurant,” he says. “But where we differ is, we like to push boundaries.”
Bardea’s dining room is utterly unique—both rustic and grandiose, with touches of bronze, European hanging lights, and stressed wooden features. One half-expects to glance out the window to a view of the Tyrrhenian Sea.
This approach creates a menu that makes room for both eggplant parm and duck breast with pickled baby beets and kumquats. Whether he’s finding uses for Asian sambal chilis or painting a plate with tamarind agrodolce, DiMeo keeps diners on their toes. His modern flair might have scared some Wilmington diners off 15 years ago, but that picture is changing. The city that long harbored a reputation for culinary conservatism—think surf-and-turf specials and heavily sauced veal parmesan—feels like it’s finally turning a corner.
“I’ve kept my eyes on this neighborhood,” Stein says. “There’s so much corporate business down here that I think there is definitely a need for great restaurants. There are already great restaurants on the street, but I think that the market’s been underserved a little bit—how does downtown Wilmington not have more options for dining?”
In April, Bardea’s profile grew even further, when Stein and DiMeo revealed they would open a small pizzeria inside DE.CO, a new, multimillion- dollar upscale food hall that occupies a busy artery on Delaware Avenue.
“We’ve grown a lot in the five months that we’ve been here,” DiMeo says. “Every week we continued to evolve, and it got to the point where we realized people were very receptive to the food and to the concept, and we were able to just keep pushing.”
Just like their adopted Wilmington, Stein says, “We want to be great.”
Bardea, 620 North Market St., Wilmington, Delaware
(302) 426-2069; Facebook and Instagram
