What's New in Del Mar for Summer 2026: Openings & Events

Walk the half mile of Camino Del Mar between 15th Street and the Plaza right now and you are walking through a quiet act of succession. Four addresses that anchored the Village for a decade or longer are either newly reopened under different flags or actively under construction. The changeover is happening in the same three weeks the Thoroughbred Club is closing out its meet and the Horsepark is running its final national jumper classic of the summer. If you live here, this is the window where old Del Mar and new Del Mar are visible in the same afternoon.

The half mile that changed hands

Start at 1247 Camino Del Mar. That storefront was Zel's Del Mar from 2010 until last year. It is now Coral Del Mar, a Baja, Hawaiian, and Southeast Asian coastal concept from Amanda Devine and Gio Morelli, who took the keys and kept the room's bones while lightening the palette. Devine has said publicly that the intent was to carry forward the neighborhood-favorite feel Greg and Jen built at Zel's over fifteen years, not to erase it.

A few blocks up, Queenstown Public House opened on May 21, 2026. The concept comes from Queenstown Hospitality Group, the same team behind Bare Back Grill and Raglan Public House, and it leans New Zealand comfort food with an indoor-outdoor room built for long lunches. It has been open just over ten weeks as of this writing, which is exactly the age where a restaurant either finds its rhythm with locals or drifts. Early signs from the Village dining directory suggest it has landed.

Then there is 1404 Camino Del Mar, the old Bully's North building. Bully's operated on that corner from 1969 until it closed in late 2017. For nearly nine years the site has been fenced, unpermitted, permitted, redrawn, and delayed. Hillstone Restaurant Group first proposed a Gulfstream seafood house for the address. In late 2025 the company pivoted to its Honor Bar concept, the same format that anchors South Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills and Coast Village Road in Montecito. Construction is in advanced stages and the target is a first-half 2026 opening, which as of August means the debut is imminent or already soft. When it does open, it will be Hillstone's first restaurant in San Diego County, ending a decade of Hillstone loyalists driving to Orange County for a French dip.

Bully's North sat on that corner for 48 years. Honor Bar will be the first tenant to serve dinner there since the Obama administration.

Three transitions inside four blocks is not a coincidence. Del Mar's Village lease cycle tends to move in clusters when leases signed in the mid-2010s roll over together, and 2025 to 2026 has been that cluster.

One block east, at Sky Deck

The other opening worth marking is not on Camino Del Mar at all. Lobster Lab opened its fourth location during the second week of July at Sky Deck, 12841 El Camino Real, Suite 200. The Tiger Hospitality group already had a Carlsbad location running, but Sky Deck gives them the food-hall foot traffic model they have been building toward. For residents on the mesa side of the 5, this is now the closest lobster roll to home without crossing Via de la Valle.

Two things make Sky Deck worth watching separately from the Village turnover. First, its tenant mix has been rotating quickly, which means what opens next door to Lobster Lab in the fall will shape whether Sky Deck reads as a destination or a stop. Second, it is drawing a slightly different crowd than the Plaza. Village dining still skews toward L'Auberge's Ocean View Bar & Grill, Pacifica Del Mar, Poseidon on the sand, and the newer Lyric Coffee in the L'Auberge lobby. Sky Deck skews younger and quicker.

Three weeks, two horse traditions, one calendar

The dining turnover is happening on top of a compressed racing calendar. The Del Mar Thoroughbred Club summer meet runs mid-July through early September, and the last stretch of August is when the marquee days land. Here is what is left on the calendar as of this post:

The Uncorked Wine Festival on August 1 already came and went at the track, with more than 100 wines poured. The $1,000,000 Grade I Pacific Classic, DMTC's richest race, is the anchor of the closing weeks.

If you have never made the drive to the Horsepark for HITS, the late-August Summer Classic is the easier weekend to try it. The hunter derbies run in daylight, parking is straightforward, and the grounds are quiet compared to a race day at the main track. It is a different Del Mar than the Turf Club, and it is fifteen minutes from the Plaza.

What a Del Mar resident's week actually looks like right now

Because the openings and the calendar are stacked, the useful question is not "what should I try," it is "what order." A reasonable late-August week for someone who already lives here:

• Thursday evening. Coral Del Mar for dinner if you have not been since the changeover from Zel's. The patio holds heat later into the evening than the room does.
• Friday afternoon. Turf Club Fridays at the track. The happy hour discount is a real 25% and it starts before the last two races.
• Saturday morning. Better Buzz or Lyric Coffee, then a walk south along the bluff. Lyric is the newer of the two and sits inside L'Auberge, which most locals still forget is publicly accessible.
• Saturday evening. Queenstown Public House. It has been open long enough to have found its service rhythm and short enough that reservations for two are still landing same-week.
• Sunday. Taste of the Turf Club or the Pacific Classic undercard, depending on the date. Or the HITS Horsepark, if it is the August 26 to 30 window.
• Any weekday. An's Hatmakers Gelato at Del Mar Plaza for a small-batch afternoon detour. Viewpoint Brewing over the San Dieguito Lagoon if you want the water without the crowd.

The one address to keep watching is Honor Bar at 1404. When it opens, expect the same pattern Hillstone has produced in every market it has entered: a slow first month, a two-hour wait by month three, and a permanent shift in the Village's weeknight foot traffic pattern. The old Bully's North corner has been dark for a long time. Lighting it back up will change how the north end of Camino Del Mar feels after 7 p.m.

The through line

The reason to notice all of this at once, rather than as five separate news items, is that Del Mar's Village is doing something that does not happen often here. It is refreshing the tenants that define its identity while its two signature summer traditions, thoroughbred racing and hunter-jumper competition, run in parallel. For the next three weeks you can eat at a restaurant that opened in May, watch a race meet that has run since 1937, and drive fifteen minutes inland to a jumper derby, all in the same weekend. That combination is why people stay in this town for decades. It is also why the addresses turning over on Camino Del Mar matter more than a typical restaurant opening would somewhere else. The Village's character is not a fixed thing. It is negotiated, lease by lease, every few years.

If you are curious how these Village shifts are affecting values along the coast, or you are thinking about the timing of a listing or a purchase before the fall market, Kathleen A Nelson and the Katie Nelson + Associates team live and work these blocks daily. Book an Appointment for a conversation grounded in the same on-the-ground detail you just read.