Fine Dining Comes to Wilmington

For years, dining well in Wilmington meant a reliable steakhouse or a business lunch at a hotel restaurant. Lately the city has grown something more ambitious: a genuine fine-dining scene, driven by chefs willing to take risks and a corporate clientele with the means to reward them.

The economics help. A downtown thick with bankers, lawyers, and executives supplies exactly the expense-account and special-occasion trade that a serious restaurant needs to survive, and the best new kitchens have positioned themselves to capture it.

The cooking has grown up accordingly. Tasting menus, careful sourcing, and thoughtful wine programs — once unimaginable in the city — now anchor a handful of restaurants that would hold their own in a much larger market.

The scene remains small and, like fine dining everywhere, precarious. High costs and fickle demand make the top of the market a hard place to survive. But Wilmington has crossed a threshold: it is now a city where an ambitious chef can build a following, and where diners have somewhere to go when the occasion calls for more than a good steak.