How Dean Neff Helped Make Wilmington One of the South’s Great Seafood Cities

By Eric Barton | June 19, 2026

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

The first thing chef Dean Neff remembers wanting to understand was the ocean.

Neff was a kid who had moved from Columbus to Savannah when he was about five years old, and the water became a kind of second classroom. His family drove to the beach most weekends when the weather allowed it.

“I was endlessly curious about the ocean,” Neff says. “Fishing was a big activity growing up in Savannah, and I would often cook bluefish, shark, shrimp, and crabs. If I could catch it, I would try to take it home and cook it.”

Today as the chef of two Wilmington restaurants, Seabird and Zora’s Market & Kitchen, Neff has become one of the country’s most visible advocates for coastal cooking. He’s not just buying fish from nearby waters because it looks good on a menu. He’s building restaurants around the people who catch it, sell it, cook it, and need access to it.

Neff

Before any of that, he was the youngest of four kids, often left alone in the kitchen while his parents worked. His siblings were six, eight, and 10 years older, which meant they were old enough to have their own lives—and wise enough not to interrupt a kid who had found something useful to do.

“I believe they left me alone in our kitchen to do whatever I wanted because it made me happy,” Neff says. “Or possibly because I was not bothering them.”

At 16, he got his first true restaurant job in the kitchen of a Japanese restaurant. Soon after, he left home, couch-surfed with friends for a stretch, and learned quickly that cooking could be a trade, a creative outlet, and a way to pay rent. “I think that was the first moment when I felt cooking could bring me satisfaction in an artistic way, but also be a career and lead to independence,” he says.

Chef Dean Neff Wilmington North Carolina bonito crudo with watermelon at Seabird

Neff later worked at Five & Ten in Athens, the Hugh Acheson restaurant that continues to shape a generation of Southern cooks. It was there that the lesson sharpened: ingredients were not just things to manipulate. They were relationships. “As a chef, your appreciation and respect for an ingredient, and the people behind that ingredient, is the most important virtue in good cooking,” Neff says. “Ingredients and techniques that have stories are the most direct route to good food.”

Bonito crudo at Seabird

Miso braised grouper cheeks at Seabird in Wilmington

Five & Ten also showed him that a restaurant could become part of the civic fabric. Neff describes himself as a sensitive kid who learned patterns of avoidance early, staying busy rather than sitting too long with what he was feeling. Restaurants, when they were at their best, gave that sensitivity somewhere productive to go.

Seabird’s miso-braised grouper cheeks

Zora’s fried fish basket

From Athens, Neff and his wife, Lydia Clopton, moved to Asheville. He became chef de cuisine at Rhubarb, while Clopton worked on the opening team at Katie Button’s Nightbell and built her own wedding cake business. Asheville gave them a serious food town and a hard lesson in timing.

“Asheville is one of the most established, important food towns in the country,” Neff says. “This was the beautiful part. The cost of living is unsustainable for most people working in restaurants there.”

Then came the broken kneecap. Neff injured himself running on a trail and kept working on it for a month before getting X-rays, which is either admirable or ridiculous, depending on how recently you’ve worked a line. The injury pushed him toward a full-time teaching job at A-B Tech’s culinary program, along with coaching the competition cooking team. It was unpaid extra work, he says, but worth it.

Chef Dean Neff Wilmington Seabird po-boy

Seabird shrimp po-boy

An old Athens friend eventually convinced Neff and Clopton to move to Wilmington, where opening a restaurant felt possible. In 2014, they opened PinPoint and began learning the coastal food scene in earnest. They sold their shares in 2019. Two years later, they opened Seabird.

“With Seabird, we heard it loud and clear that Wilmington needed a seafood restaurant that celebrated the stories of the people behind the seafood,” Neff says. “The location felt grand enough to deliver that lofty task.”

Seabird then and now is defined by North Carolina oysters, seafood towers, catfish with oyster étouffée, swordfish schnitzel, and a menu that turns coastal sourcing into something far more interesting than a procurement policy. The James Beard Foundation noticed too, naming Neff a finalist for Outstanding Chef in 2024 and a semifinalist again in 2026.

Then came Zora’s, Wilmington’s longtime seafood market, where Neff and Clopton are trying to preserve a community institution rather than smooth it into something shinier. Zora’s gives him a way to connect the fine-dining side of seafood to the everyday one: fresh fish, steam bags, shrimp burgers, spots and grits, EBT access, and a free fish program for people experiencing food insecurity.

Marsh Hippies from The Oyster Girl

Chef Dean Neff Wilmington Zora's steamer bags

“With Zora’s, we are still learning what exactly we are supposed to do,” Neff says, “but all signs point toward doing everything we can to continue to preserve the legacy of the market as a community space providing healthy, fresh seafood of all price ranges.”

Steamers at Zora’s

Zora's soft serve

That’s the thread running through Neff’s life now, from the Savannah kid hauling home whatever he could catch to the Wilmington chef trying to make seafood feel both special and available. The restaurants have gotten more ambitious. The mission has gotten simpler.

“I’ve always felt that the tastiest food falls more on the comfort-food side of the spectrum than the fine-dining side,” Neff says. “My goal is to continue to learn about my community through great food while challenging myself to make food that brings people back for more and more.