Camino Del Mar Just Turned Over a Century of Restaurant History in One Year

Walk the four blocks of Camino Del Mar between 13th Street and the Del Mar Plaza and you are standing on ground that barely changed hands for two generations. Zel's ran its kitchen there for about 15 years. Bully's North poured drinks on that same stretch for 48. Pacifica Del Mar has been serving sugar-spiced salmon with an ocean view since 1989, a run of 37 years. Add those three numbers and you get close to a century of continuous restaurant operation on one short street.

This year, all three changed hands. Not over a decade. Not across a slow rotation of new owners testing the market. Within about eight months, in the same calendar year, a Baja-Hawaiian fusion spot took over the old Zel's space, a nine-year construction saga finally ended at the old Bully's North corner, and the village's longest-running dining room announced it would close for good in December. If you live in Old Del Mar and eat on this street even occasionally, that is worth understanding, because the version of Camino Del Mar you knew a year ago is mostly gone.

Nine Years, Three Concepts, One Corner

The corner at 1404 Camino Del Mar sat dark or under construction for most of the past decade. Bully's North closed there in late 2017 after nearly five decades in business, and what came next was less a renovation than a slow-motion identity crisis. Hillstone Restaurant Group first proposed an R+D Kitchen for the site. That plan gave way to Gulfstream, the company's seafood concept. By December 2025, the project had shifted again, this time to Honor Bar, a smaller, bar-forward format built around sushi, sandwiches and cocktails.

On August 4, 2026, it finally opened. Honor Bar's own site places it plainly: the restaurant describes itself as sitting in the heart of Old Del Mar, a couple of miles from the racetrack, with parking below the building accessed off an alley on 13th Street. The city's 2018 approval called for a 4,169-square-foot restaurant built over two levels of parking with 59 spaces, and at the time officials noted it would be the first newly constructed commercial building in downtown Del Mar in more than three decades.

The menu that finally arrived is smaller than the Gulfstream concept once promised. There are nine sushi rolls, from a $14 spicy carrot and avocado roll to a $22 hiramasa roll with roe, alongside ten house specialties that include the $21 Honor Burger, the $21 Ding's Crispy Chicken Sandwich, and Hillstone's $26 French dip. It is walk-ins only, cashless, and the dress code rules out sportswear and gym clothes, which tells you something about the room Hillstone is trying to run on a street that has spent the last decade waiting for it to open.

The 15-Year Tenant That Moved On First

Before Honor Bar's corner reopened, the space at 1247 Camino Del Mar had already changed. Zel's Del Mar had operated there since 2010. In mid-April 2026, it became Coral Del Mar, a Baja-Hawaiian and Southeast Asian concept from hospitality operators Amanda Devine and Gio Morelli. Devine told SanDiegoVille that the former owners, Greg and Jen, had played a role in the community for about 15 years, and that Coral hoped to carry the same feeling forward under a brighter, coastal-facing aesthetic.

That is a full generation of one restaurant's identity replaced inside a single spring, on the same block where Bully's North had already been dark for years and Honor Bar was still months from opening.

The Treehouse That Showed Up in Between

A block away at 1435 Camino Del Mar, Queenstown Del Mar opened on May 21, 2026, the sixth location for Queenstown Hospitality Group and its first outside the New Zealand-themed chain's usual San Diego footprint in Little Italy and the UTC mall. Owner PJ Lamont told Axios San Diego that the layout puts the dining room on one side, a bar on the other, and a fire pit in the middle, with enough grass and leaves worked into the design that "it feels like you're outside, even though you're inside." The menu sticks to Queenstown's usual meat and veggie pies, lamb and wagyu burgers, with poke tacos and a shrimp and mango salad among the standouts.

So by late May, two of the four blocks had already turned over. Honor Bar had not opened yet. Pacifica Del Mar had not yet announced its closure. The street was mid-transition and nobody outside the industry had connected the dots.

The 37-Year Run That's Ending

The fourth piece of this turnover has not finished yet. Pacifica Del Mar, which opened inside the newly built Del Mar Plaza in 1989 as one of the property's first tenants, announced in May that its lease would not be renewed. The restaurant will close in December after 37 years, and Del Mar Plaza's property manager confirmed the decision was part of a broader review of the plaza's tenant mix, according to The Coast News. The restaurant survived a change in ownership when founders Kipp Downing and Jacquee Renna-Downing sold it to Sangiv Chopra in 2016, along with recessions and the pandemic, before finally running out of runway on lease terms rather than sales.

J.T. Hutchens, the restaurant's executive chef, beverage director and sommelier, has worked there for 30 years. He told CBS 8 the closure will be hard on longtime staff.

"We're kind of like a family."

Water Grill, the upscale seafood brand with a flagship in downtown San Diego's Gaslamp Quarter, is expected to take over the oceanview space, but not soon. Pacifica stays open through the end of December, and given Water Grill's history of extensive remodels on past projects, its Del Mar debut is not expected before 2027 at the earliest. That leaves a real gap. For at least the first months of 2027, one of the plaza's best ocean-view dining rooms will simply be closed.

What This Means for a Walk Down Camino Del Mar This Fall

If you have lived in Old Del Mar for a while, the practical shift is straightforward. Your dinner rotation on this street looked one way in January and looks different now. Coral Del Mar and Queenstown have had a full summer to work out their kitchens and their crowds. Honor Bar is brand new, which means reservations are not yet the norm there and walk-in waits will likely be longest through the fall as word spreads. Pacifica Del Mar is still open for lunch and dinner daily through the holidays, which makes this the season to use it if you have not been in a while, since after December that particular room, with its view and its 37-year menu of day-one dishes like the sugar-spiced salmon, will not exist in its current form again.

The bigger pattern is less about any single restaurant and more about what it says about the street itself. Three storefronts that had not changed hands in a combined century all turned over inside one year, while the fourth prepares to follow in December. That is not the normal churn of a coastal dining scene. It is a genuine reset, and it happened on the same four blocks most Old Del Mar residents walk without thinking twice.

I keep a close eye on changes like this, not because a new restaurant menu affects home values on its own, but because the character of a street like Camino Del Mar is part of what makes living in Old Del Mar what it is. If you are curious what else is shifting in the neighborhood, or you simply want a local's read on how the village is evolving, I am always glad to talk. And if you are ever curious what your own Old Del Mar home might be worth in a market that keeps changing this fast, you can start with a complimentary valuation from Ranch & Coast Living any time.