For more than three decades, Afshar made the drive from Eugene to Salem, creating a restaurant experience built as much around people as food.
For more than three decades, Mo Afshar kept showing up for Salem.
He lived in Eugene, but five days a week he made the drive north to DaVinci Ristorante, where generations of Salem diners came to know his smile, his embrace and, often, a kiss on the cheek.
Afshar died Wednesday night surrounded by family.
To those closest to him, the restaurant is only part of what he leaves behind.
“My uncle is probably one of the most passionate and loving people that you’ll ever meet,” his nephew Arash said. “I don’t think that anyone’s ever walked through the doors of Da Vinci that hasn’t been embraced and given a kiss on the cheek and welcomed with, you know, the biggest smile possible.”
That warmth became inseparable from DaVinci.
Afshar immigrated to the United States in the 1980s and eventually built DaVinci with his brother, Arash’s father. The restaurant opened around 1990 and became a fixture of downtown Salem over the next 35 years.
The idea was never simply to open another restaurant.
They wanted to give Salem an experience.
There was live piano music on weekends. Art was carefully selected for the dining room. The wine collection grew over the years. The restaurant could feel refined enough for a special occasion without becoming a place where people felt they did not belong.
“It always felt like it was upscale, but also approachable for people to come to,” Arash said.
But the experience began before the food arrived.
“It starts with you walk in and there he is welcoming you with open arms,” Arash said. “And I think that’s kind of what he strove for in the community.”
Afshar kept making that drive from Eugene as downtown Salem changed around him.
Restaurants opened and closed. Businesses came and went. The city went through prosperous periods and difficult ones.
Mo stayed.
For longtime customers, DaVinci became part of anniversaries, birthdays, date nights, business dinners and evenings before a performance at the nearby Elsinore Theatre. Many came back enough times that the man who owned the restaurant became part of their own memories of it.
News of his death traveled quickly Wednesday night.
Within an hour or two, Arash said, the family was already receiving calls and messages from people whose lives had crossed paths with Mo.
“The impact that he has, not just within the Afshar family, but the broader community, it’s humbling,” he said.
Still, Arash wanted one part of his uncle’s life placed above everything else.
Afshar was a husband. A father. A grandfather. A brother.
“He has a lot of family that he is survived by that are going to miss him,” Arash said.
DaVinci will close temporarily through at least the end of this week while the family grieves. A notice will be placed on the restaurant’s front door explaining the closure.
But the family has no intention of allowing the restaurant Mo spent decades building to disappear.
“Da Vinci’s has too deep of a history and too deep of roots in Salem for it to close,” Arash said.
What comes next will be decided together. Afshar’s daughters, his brother and longtime members of the DaVinci team are expected to share in carrying the restaurant forward.
There may never be another person standing at the door quite like Mo.
But the family intends to continue what he spent 35 years building — a place where people could walk in, be welcomed and feel, even for an evening, like they belonged.
For Salem, that may be the most fitting way to remember him.
