The Navy Yard's First Real Restaurant Is on a Roof

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The Navy Yard just got its first full-service restaurant. It is on a roof, it is Italian, and it is the most interesting thing to happen to North Charleston dining this year.

Riva Mare opened atop Storehouse Nine at the old naval base, and Indigo Road is behind it, the group that gave you Indaco, O-Ku and Colletta. That alone would be news. What makes it worth the drive is who is running the kitchen.

Sean McMullen came from Luminosa in Asheville, where he was chef de cuisine and where the restaurant earned a Michelin green star for sustainability. That is not a star for cooking. It is a star for wasting nothing, which is harder and rarer.

He is running the same playbook here, just with Lowcountry fish instead of Appalachian everything.

"When you come up the elevator and enter the space, it's like entering an entirely different time and place," McMullen told Garden & Gun.

He is not overselling it. Coral shiplap, red and white stripes, chairs shipped from Italy, a checkered raw bar stocked with Carolina oysters, and a rooftop patio looking straight out at the Cooper River. David Thompson Studio did the design. The kitchen is open, so you walk the length of the whole operation on your way in.

Here is where it gets interesting. The menu is built largely out of the parts other kitchens throw away.

McMullen found out that Miss Paula at Tarvin Seafood sells shrimp bits, the broken pieces left over from peeling and deveining. Those become the filling for pansotti, triangular pasta dyed black with squid ink and seasoned with lemon and Calabrian chili. His current favorite pizza starts as the trim from the tuna carpaccio, poached in olive oil into a conserva and finished with pickled serranos.

Elsewhere: smoky snapper tartare with charred corn, mint and citrus. A corn pasta built on Bradford Farm corn. Whole fish with basil oil and charred lemon, rotating on whatever came in that morning. Sardine toast on grilled focaccia with whipped ricotta.

Drink the aqua pazza while you watch it happen. Gin infused with cherry tomato and parsley, a bitter aperitif, vermouth blanc.

Why it matters now: the Navy Yard has spent a decade filling with makers, shops and apartments without a single sit-down restaurant to anchor any of it. Riva Mare is the first. If it works, it changes what that whole side of the harbor is for on a Friday night.

And McMullen already sounds like he lives here.

"I've got so many friends who are doing awesome things at places like Chubby Fish, Vern's, Bareo, Kultura, Cane Pazzo," he said. "It's so inspiring and invigorating to join the scene here. A rising tide lifts all ships."

Peak rooftop season has about six good weeks left in it. Go before the weather turns.

This is a summary of an article published in Garden & Gun. Click here if you'd like to read that article.