At The Diving Horse in Avalon, chef Palmer Marinelli is taking a new approach to seaside eating

Summers spent at the Jersey Shore are filled with all sorts of taste memories — salty boardwalk fries and cheesy slices from Mack & Manco’s (now Manco & Manco), cones of sprinkled soft-serve from Kohr Bros. and the somehow-always-stale saltwater taffy. 

But for the past five years, owner Dan Clark and managing partner Ed Hackett, the duo behind Pub & Kitchen and Fitler Dining Room, have been taking a different approach to beach eats with The Diving Horse, their sunny BYO on Dune Drive in the heart of Avalon. Open seven days a week from Memorial Day weekend until a week after Labor Day, it’s something of a Jersey Shore anomaly in the best possible way. They’ve got a family thing going. 

Chef Palmer Marinelli has spent the past three years at The Diving Horse, but he’s hardly a stranger to the Shore. “I spent every summer that I can remember two towns up in Strathmere. It’s really, really tiny there, and if we’re painting some romantic picture, my childhood days were spent on my great aunt’s fishing dock on the bay.” 

Getting reacquainted with local Jersey catches wasn't a challenge for Marinelli. “We fished there or on the surf or we’d take one of those day boats and that was the number-one hobby. I remember most of these fish from catching them and being so proud that I caught something and inevitably we’d take it home and eat it.”

Utilizing the bounty of seafood and produce that Cape May County has to offer is huge for Marinelli when it comes to menu planning. Think Cape May salt oysters to start, Barnegat Light scallops with toasted farro, English peas, nettles and rhubarb, and Jersey fluke paired with a fava hummus and a roasted tomato, chickpea and chorizo ragu. But Marinelli takes it even further, with briny sea beans foraged from the causeway leading over the bridge to Avalon, and locally harvested herbs like sorrel, anise hyssop and lavender chive blossoms.

This year, he plans to introduce even more close-to-home catches from Dock Street Seafood. “In New Jersey, there are weird names for all of the fish and no one knows what they are,” Marinelli explains, rattling off a list that included slippery bass, sea frogs, scups and sea robins. “In France, they’re called merles de mer and they’re all over fancy menus there. And the guys here are like, ‘They’re bait fish,’ but no, we can use them, let’s find a way to do it.”

Finding a way to do it is a common refrain at The Diving Horse, a restaurant that sustains on a season that is only as long as a summer break, and faces issues unknown to year-round places. First off, there’s housing a staff that’s almost entirely Philadelphia-based. The owners rent a house for the summer with 16 beds where the majority of the staff stays for the duration of the season. 

When asked about the staff house, Marinelli laughs. “Ah, the great question! Everyone is curious. We all live together and this makes the restaurant obviously very special.” 

Located a few blocks from the restaurant, the house is outfitted with eight bedrooms, two beds to a room. “I guess it’s quite comfortable, you know, a nice place to live. It’s easy for us because it’s on the island and because the summer is so condensed and stressful, it’s an easy way to give the staff a break and they don’t have to worry about it. It would be impossible to find housing for everyone. I know some people who work at those restaurants in Cape May have a terrible time of it. So this makes everything easy. It also makes it impossible to avoid work,” he says.

Because The Diving Horse is go-go-go from the beginning of the season until the end — plus the communal living vibe — there is a certain intensity. “But that’s also one of the good things about it, and in a way, what keeps me coming back. It’s such a 24/7 immersion that I feel that every summer I work here I progress as a cook faster than I do during the rest of the year. And we’re all around. Even if it’s your day off, you’re talking about what happened the day before, you know? We’re all sharing books. We’re sharing things that interest us,” Marinelli says. 

The intensity of the summer allows Marinelli to spend a good part of the off-season last year traveling and staging at places like Coi in San Francisco and Aria in Australia. He then headed back to help Rob Marzinsky at Fitler Dining Room and then prep for summer. 

“By the end of the summer, we’re very close,” says Laura Bonadonna, events manager and Marinelli’s girlfriend. “We were close before we came, and we’re even closer after. But it’s nice because we do feel like a family.”

The concept of family resonates throughout The Diving Horse, from its family-style Sunday dinners to the late-night meals cooked after service at the staff house. “Avalon, it’s a family town,” Marinelli says. “We started doing family-style dinners on Sundays here and that whole concept of family is something that we’ve been talking about amongst the staff because we eat dinner together here before service, and so many times when we go home to the house. The whole restaurant was started because of our owner Dan [Clark]. This is where his family went, and he’s here almost every weekend with his sister and her kids and his parents. There’s already a family mentality that just kind of came with the restaurant so we want to embrace that in a big way.” 

THE DIVING HORSE | 2109 Dune Drive, Avalon, N.J., 609-368-5000, thedivinghorseavalon.com. Daily, 5-10 p.m.Starters, $11-$16; mains, $29-$36.