Deep-Sea Dining Author: Pam George With the opening of his fourth coastal restaurant, Chef Matt Haley is building a culinary empire The fast life caught up to Matt Haley in his 20s. “The truth be known, I was dying,” says Haley, who was addicted to alcohol and drugs. “It was that bad.” So bad, in fact, that he wound up in a long-term rehabilitation facility. Realizing he needed to change, he made a list of his goals. “One day, I wanted to live at the beach and have a little restaurant and live on the water,” says Haley, a fourth-generation Washingtonian. “And I wanted to have a hammock and a white pick-up truck and I wanted to drink lemonade in my hammock.” Today, he has all of the above—and then some. Haley is perhaps Delaware’s best known coastal restaurateur. This month, he and partner Harry Geller will open their fourth restaurant, Catch 54 Fish House in Fenwick Island, which is located in the space formerly occupied by Shark’s Cove Marina and Restaurant. The partners’ company, SolDel Concepts—short for Southern Delaware—also owns Bluecoast Seafood Grill in North Bethany Beach, Fish On! in Lewes, and Northeast Seafood Kitchen in Ocean View. Although they go by different names, the restaurants share certain characteristics. All feature interiors designed by Bryony Zeigler, currently the general manager of Bluecoast. Call it funky retro meets industrial chic. All adhere to Haley’s dedication to fresh food prepared simply. “Any white fish is great with olive oil or butter, and lemon–and a little sea salt,” Haley says. The restaurants are packed in summers, and this past winter, they more than held their own in a sluggish marketplace. “If we are up in this economy, what is it going to be like in the off-season when the economy picks up?” says Haley, whose company employs about 250. It is a good problem to have. Yet success has not spoiled the 46-year-old. “He hasn’t changed, and he does what he does because he has a passion for it,” says friend and fellow chef Kevin Reading, owner of Nage in Rehoboth Beach. The middle child of five—he has two older brothers and a younger brother and sister—Haley grew up in a single-parent household. His mother ran a daycare, minding 20 children in addition to her own. A neighborhood family let the Haley family use a Delaware beach house for two weeks in summer. “It seemed the house was 15 x 15 and there were 30 people there,” Haley says. His mother shucked oysters and steamed crabs, all served on picnic tables with red-and-white checkered tablecloths. The seafood vied for table space with corn-on-the-cob and salads with Thousand Island dressing. The beach fare was a welcome change from his mother’s usual pork chops with sauerkraut, spaghetti with Ragu, and pork and beans with hot dogs. Perhaps seeking culinary satisfaction, Haley started working in restaurant kitchens—until his addictions got the best of him. After recovering, he launched a restaurant in Bethesda, Md. Although he lived three miles from the restaurant, it took him 45 minutes to get to work because of traffic. Fed up, he moved to the beach to work on The Third Edition in Rehoboth Beach, now 59 Lake. Haley and a partner then opened Redfin in Bethany, which demonstrated Haley’s devotion to minimalist seafood dishes. But the relationship went sour, resulting in a lawsuit. While Redfin was tied up in litigation, Haley opened Fish On!. He later regained the Bethany restaurant, which he rechristened Bluecoast. Northeast Seafood Kitchen, now a local favorite, followed. Haley acknowledges that the restaurants have had their share of “loose cannon, ego-maniac Food Network chefs who wanted to turn our restaurants into test kitchens.” Those days are over, he says. Today, the restaurants all bear Haley’s distinctive blend of seafood preparations and clever takes on comfort food. Perhaps nowhere is this as evident as at Catch 54, which may even offer Green Goddess dressing, the culinary hallmark of the baby boom generation. Catch 54 also takes inspiration from what Haley alternately refers to as “family favorites from the past.” Think crab cakes, crab imperial, lobster thermidor, baked oysters, raw oysters, and fried shrimp. “We’ll have tautog and bluefish and a lot of the local fish,” he says. Haley knows his fish. He frequently flies to Florida to go deep-sea fishing, and trawls Delaware’s back bay area for flounder, rockfish, and bluefish. With four restaurants, you’d think he would have little time for fishing—especially since he also has cooking programs on the Comcast channel and on Sea Colony’s resort channel. And he regularly appears on the WBOC morning news. Haley, however, takes time for himself. He keeps a folding chair in the back of his old Ford pick-up truck. “Some days, when I’m just driving down the road between restaurants, I pull off onto any of these little roads that lead to the bay, pull out the chair, and sit down for a half-hour to an hour,” he says. He also finds time to help others. “He likes to inspire young people and be around young people,” Reading says. “And he has endless amounts of energy.” Haley is on the board of three treatment centers in the Washington, D.C. area, and he recently paid for room and board for 20 kids at an Ocean City hotel so they could attend a Narcotics Anonymous conference. He spent time talking with the group. “Being able to do this makes it all worth it, because of where I was,” says Haley, who 11 years ago had to borrow bus fare from his mother. “I am so much more than what I do for a living, and I wouldn’t do what I do today if I couldn’t give back.”