Jamón Jamón: A new Delray Beach tapas bar that’s smitten with ham

The new tapas bar inside the Delray Beach Market food hall is an island of ham and cheese sophistication. Except here, you don’t call it ham – it’s jamón. You sit beneath a rustic canopy of cured legs of jamón that dangle above the stir of corks popping, forks clinking, plates served on the wooden bar and diners chatting up their well-informed servers.

Welcome to Jamón Jamón, the ham-obsessed bar named after a vintage Spanish sexy comedy flick. The freestanding bar is the brainchild of well-traveled chef and specialty foods expert Matt Reilly and internationally recognized cheesemonger Lee Salas.

They joined forces 10 months ago, when the food hall debuted, to open the Cellar and Pantry gourmet market, which is related to and located steps from the tapas bar.

“We thought this ham bar concept would be great,” says Reilly, whose culinary career has included opening Eataly markets in New York and Chicago for the specialty Italian marketplace.

Reilly and Salas, who had been encouraged by Delray Beach Market management to expand their footprint at the food hall, got their chance to open Jamón Jamón in December 2021, after the food hall’s Tekka Bar sushi counter closed. But what would they name their new enterprise?

“Lee saw the movie ‘Jamón Jamón’ and suggested that’s what we should call it,” says Reilly. "We thought that would be fun."

Supplying the bar wasn’t a stretch for Reilly, who had built a solid network of premier specialty foods purveyors for his Cellar and Pantry market and sandwich counter. Reilly is well acquainted with the makers of artisanal cheeses and premium charcuterie in Europe and the United States.

“I put together a few traditional tapas dishes, and we were up and running in less than a week,” he says.

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Tapas at Jamón Jamón

When Reilly refers to tapas, he doesn’t mean the trendy, generic concept one sees at many restaurants that tout creative small plates. He means top-rate, finely sliced hams, glorious cheeses served with a triangle of quince paste, top-notch marinated boquerones (white anchovies) from Spain and only Spain, octopus dusted in beechwood-smoked sea salt, a good wedge of Spanish omelet, simply presented olives, fried Marcona almonds and toasted slices of rustic sourdough bread – locally baked at Jupiter’s Bread by Johnny – spread with warm roasted garlic and a dollop of freshly grated tomato.

He means simple yet heartfelt dishes. They’re not intended to outshine the bar’s natural and biodynamic wines, but to harmonize as part of an intimate tapas bar experience, says Reilly.

“A tapas bar has to be personal. It has to be natural and welcoming and sincere. If you think about a tapas bar in Spain, it’s not impersonal,” says Reilly, who cooked for a time in Salamanca, Spain. “It’s about somebody who has a bar and is offering little bites to go with the wine. It doesn’t come from an ego-driven-chef-mind of a place.”

The bar has become a popular, wine-o-clock spot and buzzes on weekends.

But while the spirit of the place was inspired by the tapas bars of Spain, the menu offerings at Jamón Jamón stray beyond the Iberian Peninsula. In addition to Spanish jamón, Reilly and Salas offer hams cured in the style of Spain, Italy and Portugal in unexpected places – like Wantage, New Jersey. That’s where a pig farmer and butcher named Rodrigo Duarte raises prized, Alentejo-lineage hogs on Iberian acorns and chestnuts in the style of his native Portugal.

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Reilly also procures prize-winning culatello ham and other cured meats from Chicago’s Tempesta Artisan Salumi purveyors, which follow Italian curing traditions.

“What’s unique about that is that the craft here in America is starting to meet the craft in Italy. We are producing better and better products,” he says.

And he has added to the menu American country ham made from heritage Berkshire pork raised at Newman Farm in Missouri, just north of the Arkansas border.

Says Reilly: “We’re trying to highlight the commonality of the various different gastronomic traditions.”

Jamón Jamón tapas bar

A tapas bar located inside the Delray Beach Market, at 33 SE 3rd Ave., Delray Beach, on Instagram @JamonJamon_bar.

The bar is an extension of the food hall's Cellar and Pantry gourmet shop.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Delray Beach Market welcomes new tapas restaurant smitten with ham