Sixteen years ago, when The New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin wrote his culinary anthropology piece, “Where’s Chang?” it was not so easy to find acclaimed Chinese chef Peter Chang, who at the time moved from restaurant to restaurant, often without notice, resulting in long Chowhound fanboy detective threads.

These days, however, those of us in the DMV can find the acclaimed chef and restaurateur pretty easily. (This piece could be called, “Where Isn’t Chang?”) In fact, he now owns 18 restaurants, which are often named after him and sport his image in their windows, along with evidence of his James Beard accolades—a showy imprimatur if ever there was one.

This is the case with Peter Chang Annapolis, one of the chef’s latest restaurants, which opened in February. PCA is a light-filled, cheerful, pea-green dining room with a huge bar, pastoral murals on the walls, and two rooms with the round tables and lazy Susans that are the best way to experience Chinese banquets. There’s also an open kitchen with a window where you can watch the chefs make dumplings and operate the Italian-made oven that houses Chang’s signature burnished Peking ducks.

This location also offers their all-you-can-eat dim sum brunch menu every day. (Baltimore’s NiHao only offers it on the weekend.) Chang has instituted his dim sum brunches at many of his restaurants—the practice started in Bethesda’s Q by Peter Chang—where diners can draw from his lengthy list of dumplings, bao, shumai, noodles, and small plates, all for a set price.

The new Annapolis location takes that trend one step further, expanding it from a weekend brunch concept to an everyday focus; this is also, happily, a trend in Chang’s other Mid-Atlantic restaurants.

I’m not usually a fan of the all-you-can-eat restaurant concept. Too many traumatic memories of Red Lobster shrimp and Las Vegas buffets, plus the inherent problem of, well, just too much food. That said, the AYCE dim sum brunch at NiHao has been life-changing for many Baltimoreans, offering all the xiaolongbao bamboo baskets and mapo tofu possible at an affordable price. The portions are helpfully small, so it’s not so much an impossible feast as an opportunity to try a bit of everything and then center down on guilt-free dumplings.

Dim sum traces its origins to teahouse snacks served to Silk Road travelers, but it came into its own in 19th-century Hong Kong, where teahouses featured roving carts bearing repeating dumplings and various small dishes. Chang came to the U.S. not from Hong Kong, but from a farming town in Hubei, and then a culinary school in Wuhan. He cooked at luxury hotels and won cooking competitions, and eventually moved to the U.S., where he was chef at the Chinese Embassy in D.C., then moved, enigmatically, through various DMV restaurant kitchens before building his own small empire and winning a slew of awards.

The Annapolis restaurant also recently started featuring to-go-only bento boxes, the terrific Japanese mainstay, here with a Sichuan twist. They’re a marvelous way to get lunch if you don’t have time to spend an hour and a half eating chile-oil wontons.

Of course, Chang’s Annapolis location has more than just dim sum and bento boxes. There are the magnificent set pieces, notably those Peking ducks, a classic Beijing dish that has long been a feature of Chang’s restaurants and which arrive lacquered on a platter, along with crepe-like pancakes and a zesty plum sauce. There are also many of the chef’s other signature dishes, including the whole branzino, thatched with ginger scallions; the dry pot spicy pork belly; the beautifully arranged, intensely colorful dragon eggplant; and Grandma’s noodles—hand-pulled strands doused with house chile sauce, vinegar, garlic, and scallions.

The Annapolis restaurant, executive-cheffed by Chungang Shi (all Chang’s restaurants are overseen by him but have their own executive chefs, who tilt the menus to their own tastes and creativity), specializes in seafood, particularly local catfish. Thus, Chesapeake blue catfish is featured—in bowls with chile sauce, in noodle soups torqued with sprigs of Sichuan peppercorns, in a sour cabbage broth, as well as in a stone pot. Specific to Annapolis is also a gloriously meaty porcini-and-duck rice pot.

All of Chang’s restaurants have excellent bar menus featuring creative cocktails, often highlighting baijiu, the Chinese sorghum-based liquor, as well as Chang’s own labeled beer, a rice lager brewed by Baltimore’s Mobtown Brewing Company.

So there is much to love in this new outpost—let us not forget the seasonal specials, which recently included two dishes featuring bullfrog. But the standouts remain that dim sum spread, loaded with soup dumplings, chile-spiked wontons, shrimp shumai, dan dan noodles, duck-stuffed bao, plus his signature scallion bubble pancakes handball-sized domes of inflated pastry served with sauces.

Sitting at table, with or without the brunch mimosas, pots of hot tea, or the sublime black-sesame egg-yolk bao (please order this, even if you think you can’t eat anymore), is a study in what an excellent brunch can be—in the absence of too many Bloody Marys and orders of eggs Benedict.

Chang’s new Annapolis restaurant may be in a nondescript concrete universe outside of Maryland’s capital city, but inside is the utterly lovely world of Sichuan food, all those teahouse-inspired banquets—and maybe a bento box to take over the Bay Bridge to the beach.

PETER CHANG ANNAPOLIS: 918 Bay Ridge Rd, Annapolis, 410 558-6958. HOURS: Mon.-Thurs., 11 a.m.-3 p.m., 4:30 – 9; Fri.-Sat., 11 a.m.-10 p.m.; Sun. 11 a.m.-9 p.m. PRICES: AYCE dim sum, $30; bento boxes, $14.95-18; entrees $48-15; Peking duck, $40-78. AMBIANCE: Modern Sichuan and Hong-Kong-style teahouse.

Lori and Jimmy Emmert’s seafood and crab house, sitting by the side of a country road in Dayton, about 25 miles southwest of Baltimore, is a decidedly old-school version of the beloved Maryland genre.

Emmert’s Seafood encompasses a pale butter-yellow clapboard house, an attached covered outdoor patio, and, for good measure (not to mention historical significance and a bit of roadside advertising), the long firehouse-red custom seafood-steaming trailer where the business officially began.

Inside the restaurant, old family photographs (Jimmy culling oysters on the South River; Jimmy on another boat with his grandfather), nautical maps, and newspaper clippings (a Waterman’s Gazette story on the family) line the cornflower-blue paneled walls of the cozy dining room. A boxy bar stands just inside the door, where the bartender can be seen squeezing fresh citrus for crushes.

Past an open door to the steam room, through which you can see huge metal pots cooking two-bushels worth of crabs, a corridor leads to the patio dining room. There, picnic-style tables are arranged in formation, topped with brown paper tablecloths weighted down by baskets of condiments, crab mallets, and rolls of paper towels, as if acknowledging that weather is always coming. Heat lamps stand at attention.

Locals and visitors, tourists and regulars all sit, gathered around plates of hush puppies and crab dip, bowls of crab soup, mandatory mounded trays of spice-dusted steamed crabs, and, eventually, maybe a slice of Smith Island cake. Imagine an Old Line State iteration of some Norman Rockwell painting.

The origins of Emmert’s, as well as the Emmerts themselves, began long before the advent of that seafood trailer. Both Lori and Jimmy grew up on the same road in Shady Side and have known each other since childhood. They married in 1987. Jimmy is the fourth generation of watermen in his family and the pair have spent their lives on Chesapeake Bay boats.

“Jimmy started working on the water when he was 15”—when he got his first work boat—“but he’s been on the water forever,” says Lori, sporting an Emmert’s shirt, a blonde ponytail, and a gold crab necklace.

She narrates the history of the framed photo of Jimmy on Parish Creek alongside his grandfather, Capt. Vernon “Whitey” Wilde, who himself came from a long line of Chesapeake Bay commercial watermen and who taught Jimmy how to fish, clam, oyster, and, of course, crab. Once people found out that he was a local waterman, Jimmy began selling his catch to restaurants and eventually the couple decided to start steaming their own seafood.

The Emmerts formed an LLC in 2003, bought the trailer in 2014, and took over the former Floyd’s Crossroads Pub in 2024. When they first started the trailer business, Lori still had a full-time job with an accounting firm but Jimmy stopped crabbing because, he says, “you can’t be two places at once.” These days, Lori works at Emmert’s too, though she still takes time off during tax season.

It is a decidedly family operation, with Lori baking many of the pies and cooking family-recipe dishes (the cream of crab soup is a recipe “that’s like 200 years old,” says Lori) while Jimmy unloads bushels of crabs outside the steam room.

Brendan Floyd, who is both bartender and manager, has worked at the restaurant for years: The Emmerts bought the place from his parents. “I kinda came with the building,” he says as he juices more citrus.

In the two years since the Emmerts began cooking for their brick-and-mortar spot—the trailer has been retired—the menu has expanded to include all the appetizers, soups, sandwiches, and fish platters you’d expect from a traditional crab house.

There are also frogs legs on the menu, something one usually finds in classical French restaurants. When they were still working out of the trailer, says Lori, “We got them for a customer who wanted them, actually his mother, who lived in West Virginia or something.” They sold them raw, as the trailer didn’t have a fryer, and customers kept asking for them. And so when they moved into the restaurant with its fryer, the frog legs, which are now breaded and fried, came with them.

And then there are the crabs, dredged in a proprietary blend of Halethorpe’s J.O. Spice, and delivered to those brown-papered tables hot from the steamer. Emmert’s serves crabs year-round, so they’re Maryland crabs during the season, then sourced from Texas and Louisiana.

After a lifetime of living and working on the water, the Emmerts source their local catch from friends and neighbors, and their wholesalers are often former colleagues who have gotten off the water.

Behind the restaurant, Jimmy unloads more bushels of the crabs that have defined both his family and his own lifetime.

“It’s a social thing when you eat seafood,” he says, remembering his grandparents’ porch parties. “We really bought this because our customers at the trailer said, ‘Won’t y’all just buy a brick-and-mortar so we can come and eat your crabs and drink beer.’”

Done and done.

EMMERT’S SEAFOOD: 4809 Ten Oaks Road, Dayton, 301-490 4423. HOURS: Wed.-Thurs., 3:30-9 p.m.; Fri., 3:30-10 p.m.; Sat. 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m., Sun. 11:30 a.m.-9 p.m. PRICES: Apps, $6.95-$23.95; sandwiches, $13.95-MP; entrees and steamed crabs, $21.95-MP; desserts, $5.99-$7.99 AMBIANCE: Old-timey crab house.

As every soccer fan in the entire world knows, and has known for the last four years, the 2026 FIFA World Cup began Thursday, June 11, with the Mexico v. South Africa match, which Mexico won 2-0. (In our case, it was a terrific excuse to eat tacos and cheer ourselves hoarse alongside other revelers at La Calle in Fells Point, as pictured above.)

For the next 39 days across the USA, Canada, and Mexico, the greatest soccer (sorry, football) tournament of all will play out not only in stadiums across North America, but also in local bars, restaurants, sports hubs, taquerias, and community greenspaces.

Here are the best Baltimore-area hangouts to quench your cravings—for eats and drinks and for what most of the planet considers the best of all sports.

La Calle: If Mexico’s first game was any indication, this Fells Point taqueria—which uses a massive projector to play the action live—is going to be well populated the next few weeks. Snag a seat, tip back a beer, and chow down on bites that showcase the flavors of the chef/owners’ native Puebla. 623 S. Broadway.

Claddagh Pub: Billed as Canton’s original soccer bar, with roots dating back to 1995, Claddagh has long been known for its hyped-up watch parties. Head to the O’Donnell Square pub for static specials during every game, including $4 Michelob Ultras, $5 Stella Artois bottles, $5 Nutrl seltzers, and $18 Michelob Ultra buckets for a crew. 2918 O’Donnell St.

The Duchess: Hampden’s English-inspired pub was born for this. During every match, take advantage of 50 percent-off drafts and a special snack of the day. Games will be on as early as 3 p.m. Monday through Wednesday and as late as 10 p.m. Thursday through Saturday. 1002 W. 36th St. 

Guilford Hall Brewing: Big screens and big beers. What more could you ask for? This community hub near Penn Station offers multiple spaces with indoor/outdoor seating and plenty of screens. Plus, game-day grub and discounts on its house-brewed pints. For the first Team USA game on June 12 🇺🇸, expect $18 Baltimore Pilsner and Guilford Lager pitchers, as well as a roster of food specials. 1611 Guilford Ave. 

Milloh!: As an Argentine-fusion concept, it makes sense that this pop-up purveyor is going all out for the tournament. The first of many local watch parties it plans to host will be at Mobtown Brewing Company in Canton on June 12 🇺🇸. Pair your beer with a signature smash burger, and stay tuned via Instagram for more events to be announced soon. 4015 Foster Ave. 

Monument City and Key Brewing: The breweries’ Highlandtown homebase is transforming from the Baltimore Brewers’ Haven to the Baltimore World Cup Haven for the next few weeks, when regulars can expect an interactive fan zone with live music, activities, and eats and drinks during all USA games and all matches that occur Thursdays through Sundays. In true Brewers’ Haven fashion, the teams will be collaborating on the watch parties with neighbors Motte, Urban Axes, and Old Line Spirits. And a new beer is dropping for the occasion, too. (Duh!) Be sure to sample the World Cup-inspired Extra Time, a 3.5 percent ABV summer ale. 1 N. Haven St.  

R. House: The community gathering spot in the heart of Remington is ready to party. Try to arrive early to snag a seat at R. Bar for drink specials (like $8 Crushes for the first Team USA match on June 12 🇺🇸) and a prime view. 301 W. 29th St. 

Sláinte Irish Pub: Soccer is religion at this Thames Street staple on the water in Fells Point. Here, the staff has dreamed up an entire menu of clever cocktails and “Sideline Snacks” to enjoy while rooting for your team. Among them are the vodka and lemon-infused Strawberry Striker served in a soccer chalice, the Final Whistle Margarita, and a flavored 34-oz. Hat Trick Crush bucket. Snacks are inspired by participating countries, with options like Rio yucca fries, Bavarian beer brats, jàmon and gruyere puffs, and, of course, all-American sliders. 700 Thames St.

Baltimore has always been a seafood town, thanks to our generations-long love affair with crab cakes and coddies, soft-shells and crab boils, oysters, and lake trout. But it’s never had a lot of options for good sushi, which means that the January opening of Hana Sushi in Hampden came as terrific news.

Hana is the second sushi restaurant from owner Tina Chen, who opened Yama Sushi in Ellicott City in 2019 with her husband, Denny. It brings not only excellent sushi to Hampden’s 36th Street restaurant row, but also a menu of superlative ramen and yakitori, as well as an outstanding bar and cocktail program.

A pale-colored, light-filled restaurant in the corner spot that was once the late, lamented Souvlaki, Hana is the kind of one-stop Japanese restaurant this city needs. The dining room is anchored by a big, open sushi bar filled with beautiful fish shipped daily from Tokyo and helmed by veteran sushi chef Jackie Nakazima Eizi.

In addition to nigiri, sashimi, and rolls, the menu includes tonkotsu ramen made by Denny, as well as yakitori (the grilled meat skewers popularized in izakaya restaurants), gyoza, tempura, tofu, and Hana “tacos,” which are flour tortillas filled with raw fish or tofu.

There is also a little market corner, stocked with Japanese items like Pocky, instant ramen, and matcha Kit Kats, which is not only seriously adorable but means we don’t have to trek to Catonsville’s H-Mart for candy runs.

Having helmed her Ellicott City restaurant for seven years before opening Hana, Chen knows what she’s doing. The fish is the most important aspect of a good sushi place, and she gets hers—toro, yellowtail, salmon, eel, Hokkaido scallops and uni, octopus, and mackerel—daily via Jessup seafood supplier True World Foods, which flies it directly from Tokyo.

And then there’s the necessity of a sushi chef who knows what to do with all this lovely stuff. Nakazima Eizi, born, bred, and trained in Tokyo, has 45 years of experience as a sushi chef, and ran Yama Sushi’s sushi bar before moving over to open Hana. With a white chef’s cap and a welcoming smile, he operates his new sushi bar with precision, artistry, and grace.

Hana’s offerings are wide-ranging and include many tricked-out rolls, like the Edgar Allan Roe, composed of shrimp, burdock root, roe, avocado, yuzu, and chile oil, as well as others featuring crab, spicy tuna, shrimp tempura, eel, shiso and even truffled soy sauce.

Though these are fun and gorgeous, it’s the simpler nigiri sushi that allows Nakazima Eizi’s skills to shine. The eel nigiri is a succulent combination of broiled eel atop perfectly articulated rice, wrapped with a ribbon of nori, dusted with sesame seeds and a bit of sauce. And the seared salmon belly nigiri is a masterful rendition, a curl of fatty salmon draped over a nub of rice that Nakajima Eizi fires with a culinary torch so that it partially melts.

All this can be washed down with a small cup of green tea, but that would mean that you’d miss out on the excellent, highly creative cocktail program. As one would expect, there’s a large sake section, as well as Japanese beers, but there’s also an impressive whiskey list of both the American and Japanese varieties (spelled without the “e”), including bottles from Nikka and Yamazaki distillers, as well as Suntory (see: Bill Murray’s booze commercials in Lost In Translation).

And then there are those cocktails, an inventive collection that makes use of not only all the available spirits, but also ingredients like shiso, lychee, ginger, and nori. Nothing like A Night in Shinjuku—Nikka whisky, cognac, dry vermouth, amaro, maraschino, and angustura—to help wash down your double toro roll (maybe the best roll on the menu) and pork belly yakitori.

Tina and Denny are both Chinese, not Japanese, but their love of Japanese cuisine is a long and storied one. They met in Japan, where Denny was studying and where Gina lived for seven years and where they both came to love the food of the country.

While Tina runs the front of house at both restaurants, Denny is at home in the kitchen, making all the sauces and the broth for the ramen, a 10-hour-long production for the tonkotsu (there are also miso and shoyu versions).

And the ramen is terrific: milky, luscious soup paired with twisty noodles, thick slabs of pork, small mounds of grilled corn, and crucially, a perfectly cooked jammy egg. Because for lovers of ramen, there is nothing as telling as that egg, seemingly one of the easiest components of a good bowl of ramen, but often bafflingly overlooked. (The bowl of tonkotsu I recently had at one Baltimore ramen-ya came with a hard-boiled egg, something that almost made me cry.)

Discovering Hana’s ramen, as well as its fantastic sushi, has restored both my palate and my faith that if you build great sushi, Baltimore’s seafood lovers will come.

HANA SUSHI: 1103 W. 36th St., Hampden, 443-869-2503. HOURS: Tues.-Sun., 11 a.m.-10 p.m. PRICES: Starters, sides, yakitori: $4-18; ramen: $20; sushi, sashimi, and rolls: $7-32. AMBIANCE: Cozy, light-filled neighborhood spot.

When you first enter À Demain Cafe, which opened on Hampden’s 36th Street restaurant row last July, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d wandered into an antique shop. There’s a gorgeous old Victrola by the door, a flowered settee, old-fashioned light fixtures and wall hangings, and gilded old mirrors with the shop’s menus painted on the glass.

Owner Christian Yoo will likely be stationed behind the counter, offering not curios but croffles and crookies—hybrid waffle-croissants and cookie- croissants—toasts, quiches, and croque monsieurs.

À Demain, which translates to “see you tomorrow” in French, is Yoo’s first business venture, and he runs the shop with his wife, Kelly. He credits the décor, he says one weekday morning in between making matcha lattes and cappuccinos, to Gott Efni, the Ellicott City florist that the couple used for their wedding.

It’s a charming location, though be warned that the only seating is on the front porch, which in the colder months sports a heating lamp and vinyl curtains. As for the menu, Yoo chose to highlight toasts because they were “very brunchy.”

“You can put anything on toast,” says Yoo, noting that they’re also pretty straightforward recipes, which seemed right for his first restaurant venture.

They’re also quite beautiful: open-faced sandwiches similar to Scandinavian smorrebrod that come in iterations of avocado-hummus, roasted tomato burrata, mushroom, honey-ricotta, and a lox version decorated with capers and pickled red onions. For the bread, they use excellent whole-grain slices, which are delivered daily from Lyon Bakery in Hyattsville.

In addition to the toasts, there are single-serving quiches, round pies the size of soup bowls that come in mushroom or bacon and cheese; tidy square croque monsieurs; croffle Benedicts—which is what you get when you press laminated dough in a waffle iron, then top the results with poached eggs and sauce—and, in a nod to Yoo’s Korean heritage, bulgogi melts. Should you want something with more bells and whistles than toasts, you can trick out your croffle with Nutella, strawberries, matcha, bananas, Oreos, or Biscoff.

With its rough-wood counter, plants trailing from shelving, and oversized floral pillows on that settee, À Demain is a very cozy place. And while the front porch can be a bit chilly at times, that giant heat lamp wards off the cold and extends the cozy vibes beyond the front door.

Though the crookies and croffles are cute, it’s the toasts that we’ll be coming back for. With their thick rustic bread and well-executed toppings, they’re an excellent alterna- tive to most breakfast offerings, and, yes, “very brunchy,” indeed.

À DEMAIN CAFE: 830 W. 36th Street, Hampden. HOURS: Tues.-Fri. 7:30 a.m.-4 p.m.; Sat. 8 a.m.-4 p.m. PRICES: Drinks: $3-6; toasts: $11 16; brunch items: $11-16. AMBIANCE: Antique shop.

On the south side of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, jigsawed between the Domino Sugar refinery and the Baltimore Museum of Industry, sits The General Ship Repair Corporation. Where once there were convoyed rows of such shipyards along the Inner Harbor, now there is only this one, a family-owned yard that’s been in operation for more than a century. In fact, it’s one of just three ship repair works still in operation in the greater Baltimore area—the other two are in Curtis Bay—one of which only repairs Coast Guard vessels.

General Ship Repair (GSR) is a testament to the city’s maritime roots and the long history of the port of Baltimore, as well as a reminder that this whole stretch of the Inner Harbor was once composed not of hotels and condos, but of those shipyards. Situated on a two-plus-acre stretch between Key Highway and the Patapsco, it’s composed of a pair of old brick buildings; one shop each for fabrication, machinery, and electrical repair; and two 1,000-ton floating dry docks.

GSR’s endurance is also a testament to the Lynch family, who founded the business in 1924 and still owns and operates it. Charles “Buck” Lynch first started GSR as a small marine machine shop on Light Street, in the location that’s now home to the Baltimore Hyatt Regency. He moved the shipyard a mile and a half down the road to its present site in Locust Point in 1929. The business went bankrupt during the Great Depression, but Lynch managed to buy it back at auction and to grow the shipyard, which, during the height of World War II, employed as many as 600 workers. Over the years, the company has repaired and serviced schooners, steamships, paddle-wheelers, tugs, tour boats, and super tankers.

Sitting in his wood-paneled office on the second floor of the original building, photographs and paintings and ship paraphernalia from the last hundred years lining the walls, Ryan Lynch, the company’s current president and Buck’s great-grandson, downplays his family’s legacy.

“We fix ships,” he says of his team, which now numbers 45, conceding that it is kind of a broad description.

As he sits behind his desk, his father’s desk nearby, three generations of his family looking down from their portraits and photographs, Ryan seems remarkably comfortable, a man happy in the setting he quite literally grew up with. While his brother, the company’s vice president—tall, black-bearded—looks like a waterman, Ryan—youthful, clean-shaven, and clean-cut, with a Carhartt jacket taking the place of the mandatory life jackets worn on the pier—presents more like a weekend-dad outdoorsman.

“We’re taking tugboats or dinner-group cruising boats or smaller, 50-to-180-foot vessels and dry-docking them, so lifting them out of the water and being able to do full dry-dock work—blasting paint on the hull, any steel repairs on the hull, any mechanical work that needs to be done underwater,” Ryan says.

GSR also travels to ports to work on big ships like the gray military vessels that anchor nearby, and they’re able to do on-site emergency repairs when and wherever needed (they’ve gone as far afield as Hawaii).

Back in the day, paddle-wheelers—historic steamboats with large, engine-driven, submerged wheels that propelled the vessels—would come into the Inner Harbor and head to the original location of GSR for repair. These days, much of their current work is done at the two massive dry docks at the pier a few hundred feet from where Ryan is sitting. There, at the location that’s been their home for the last century, GSR’s crew can work on two ships at a time, “plus whatever’s in the water.”

Here’s the thing about ship repair: It’s painstaking work, alternating between dangerous jobs and a lot of patience between them. But it’s also highly skilled, time-honored work, and an absolutely critical component of any busy port.

Here’s the thing about ship repair: It’s painstaking labor. But it’s also highly skilled, time-honored work, and an absolutely critical component of any busy port.

Ryan pulls up historical photos of this southern stretch of the Inner Harbor, once a row of dry docks and graving docks—the narrow, excavated basins with reinforced walls used to repair ships too large for dry docks—and machine shops, where now there is only the shipyard his great-grandfather began. Over the years, as each generation took the helm—from Buck to Buck’s son, Jack; to Jack’s sons, Derick, Mike, and Cary; to Derick’s sons, Ryan and Chaz—the business grew.

“The technology of ship repair hasn’t changed too much,” says Ryan. “The machines get nicer and better, but they’re not crazy. It’s not like we’re using robots.”

He gestures over to a second wooden desk in the corner, the one used by his father before he retired in 2023. Derick wanted to keep the desk, though it’s clear it’s mostly honorary—these days, he just comes in for board meetings. But the desk functions like the portraits on the wall, a reminder of a century’s worth of history: of family, of ships, and of Baltimore.

Walk across the bridge—an old metal walkway salvaged from some ship or pier—from Ryan’s office to the newer machine shop, then downstairs and across a parking lot to the pier and its two dry docks, and you can see the Domino’s sign to your right, a neon reminder of the duration and history of Baltimore’s storied Inner Harbor.

Though many Baltimoreans’ experience of its maritime history tends to be limited to trips on the water taxi or a booze cruise excursion or visits to the Frederick Douglass-Isaac Myers Maritime Park Museum, it’s worth noting that Baltimore is the 16th busiest port in the country, in 2024 handling 45.9 million tons of international cargo valued at $62.2 billion. It took the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in March of 2024 to reify to many of us the importance of Baltimore’s port.

“I think people don’t know too much about the maritime industry and how important it is,” says Ryan, noting that this changed when the bridge fell. “Luckily for us, we had a lot of projects already here, like long-term projects,” when the disaster occurred and blocked the entrance to the harbor for 78 days while crews worked to safely clear the debris.

“This industry is very much a rollercoaster,” he continues, noting the obvious: that a vital aspect of any busy port is not only its access, but keeping the vessels that use it well-maintained. The company has repaired a hundred years-worth of barges, tankers, and tugs, and these days they work on maybe 20 to 30 vessels a year, many of which include boats docked for Coast Guard-mandated maintenance that might take more than a year to complete.

“The technology of ship repair hasn’t changed too much. The machines get nicer and better, but they’re not crazy. It’s not like we’re using robots.”

They’ve also worked on such notable vessels as the Pride of Baltimore II, the historic Baltimore clipper ship reproduction; the WW II restored Liberty ship, the S.S. John W. Brown; a series of Army Corps of Engineers boats; the N/S Savannah, a historic nuclear-powered merchant ship; the icebreaker A.V. Sandusky, which is operated by the Maryland Dept. of Natural Resources and which GSR originally built; and, yes, even Baltimore’s famous trash wheels (while not quite ship-sized, they’re big enough to warrant expert repair).

GSR also has a long-term relationship with the small fleet of the Historic Ships of Baltimore, which includes the USS Constellation and the submarine Torsk, all permanently docked on the northern side of the Inner Harbor. This breadth of skills is reflected in the trajectory of the current generation of the Lynch family. Both Ryan and his brother, Chaz, along with Dave Gross one of two current vice presidents, worked in the shipyard alongside their father and uncles during high school. Ryan graduated from the Merchant Marine Academy as a maritime engineer, then worked on commercial ships; Chaz enlisted in the Coast Guard.

“I joined the Coast Guard to get out away from home, and so I pretty much went as far away as possible,” Chaz says of his stint, which included three years in Alaska. Then, perhaps inevitably, came the pull home. “I wanted to come back to the family business,” Chaz says, now in his office down the hall from his brother’s. “This is what I know.”

Office manager Jessica Morrison, who in 2019 had the daunting task of succeeding a woman who had worked for GSR for 48 years (“hired by my grandfather,” says Ryan), came to the company not from the Coast Guard but from the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, where she played the French horn (“I went to Peabody for too many degrees to count”). But she is also a longtime sailor and so was attracted to a maritime industry job. And one of the many things she loves about her job is exactly that history.

“It is incredible talking to all these older employees, or people who just worked around the port, and hearing their stories and really thinking about how much of an influence ship-building has had in this area,” she says one morning at her desk down the hallway from Ryan’s office. Her office, too, is decorated like a ship museum, photos and paintings of historic ships on the walls, hard hats and lifejackets strewn across various chairs and tabletops.

“We are the western-most seaport on the East Coast,” Morrison says, underscoring the importance of the port of Baltimore that many don’t realize. “The reason why we get so many of the cars on the railroad ships? It’s the least expensive way to bring them in here, because we are the farthest-west point for them to load them onto rail cars.

“The maritime community is such a transient community,” Morrison continues. “But we have a very high retention rate here. Most of the other yards on the East Coast aren’t like that. If you go down to Virginia Beach, some of the larger yards down there, they’re all contracted, and they move around constantly.”

“I wanted to come back to the family business. This is what I know.”

Her favorite part of the job is seeing the historic ships they work on. (“I always go and nerd out with them whenever they show up.”) And she loves that, until recently, all the records were kept by hand—as in handwritten or typewritten—until Ryan took over and she was tasked with moving the company’s record-keeping process to digital.

But what Morrison is most proud of is GSR’s apprentice program she spearheaded, which is in its third full class. “Maryland public schools have a great youth apprenticeship program. And depending on which school district you’re in, some of them will do more with warehouse or maintenance or automotive—those are the big ones. We were their first maritime program, and it took me years to get all the paperwork through.”

This is at least partly because working in shipyards is one of the most dangerous of professions, only behind working as a stevedore those who unload cargo from ships), and so convincing the state of Maryland that they were going to keep kids safe took some work. The goal is to give students real-world experience that can lead to maritime industry jobs.

“But the other part of this for us is we’re building a pipeline for ourselves,” Morrison says, noting that GSR hired both of their first two apprentices. The experience has been as meaningful for the crew as it has been for the kids. “They take them under their wings,” she says of the longtime GSR employees, “and they’re supportive. It’s been a really great experience, not only for our practices, but for our staff.

“Now I’ve got these high school students, and I have people who are mentors for them, who are peers, who said, ‘I started out here, yeah, and now I’m here, and you can do it too, and I can show you.’ And I think some of our old-timers are really happy to show them the ropes.”

Later that morning, the crew moves a tour boat around the pier, maneuvering the ship into the three-section dry dock. Men in hard hats and lifejackets walk the parapets and shout orders to others moving and securing tow ropes as the huge ship comes around the corner and settles in. The water has already risen, coming in from the Patapsco, flooding over the supports and creating a stable system for the needed repairs. In fact, this is a stable system, of mechanics and history and family, all coming together to continue the long trajectory of this city’s maritime community.

It is a community that is set to continue for this family-run business, as Ryan and Chaz have four kids between them, all under the age of 10. “They’re very young,” says Chaz, “so we’re going to leave that decision up to them.”

But young as they are, they’re all out on the water with their fathers “as much as possible.”

Come what may, the fifth generation of the Lynch family will likely be carrying on their longtime tradition, eventually, on and in service of the water.

This article first appeared in our April 2026 issue. If you connected with it, consider becoming a print subscriber. 

Descend the stairs from Aliceanna Street into the basement shop of Fells Point’s El Suprimo Records and you’ll quickly feel like you’ve entered not so much a record store as an archive, which indeed you have. As many as 7,000 records fill the tiny space, which is 10-by-12 feet at most.

The center is a maze of stacks reaching toward the ceiling, itself decorated by discs like a vinyl version of the tin ceilings that still top many bars in the neighborhood. Bins fill both sides of the shop, divided into genres, with radios and speakers and other sonic paraphernalia jigsawed in between more records. So many records.

In the back, owner Jack Moore spins tunes on a turntable all but hidden by more stacks—John Coltrane, The Talking Heads, P.J. Harvey, Philippe Besombes, Henry Mancini, Chet Baker, Lalo Schifrin, Max Roach. One could go on.

“I’ve always loved music,” says Moore, “ever since I was, like, crawling on my hands and knees, just fascinated by it.”

Moore, 59, a Baltimore native and University of Maryland alum—where he did college radio—is a jack-of-all-trades, so to speak. He’s run the shop for nearly a quarter century—23 years this month—has his own record label, plays in bands, is writing a book, and does DJing gigs across town, notably at the Greyhound Tavern, Idle Hour, and Ottobar.

Recently, he’s been taking his setup across the street to The Wren, the year-old pub run by chef Will Mester, his wife, Millie Powell, and barkeep Adam Estes. That’s because Mester, a vinyl collector who sources records for both himself and the turntable under his bar, asked Moore to come over on Monday nights, when the acclaimed restaurant is otherwise closed, to play music for whomever happened by for a pint.

So Moore makes the yards-long trek once a month to DJ what he calls the Fells Point Troglodyte Ornithological Society Listening Party, where he’ll set up his turntable on the long wooden bar by the front door, or, on winter nights, near the fireplace in the backroom, usually used for darts.

Since this past August, the listening party has drawn neighbors and hospitality-industry folk to pull up a chair and listen to Moore’s playlist, which is mostly folk, acoustic folk, folk pysch (which Moore describes as “electrified European folk music”), and—as the party’s name promises—the occasional bird songs. The bird songs are on LPs, says Moore, and the society’s jokey name is drawn from the pub itself, troglodyte being a reference to the scientific name of wrens, which belong to the troglodytinae family, so named for being “cave dwellers.”

“I do bring records with bird songs, and once or twice during the night, I will mix in a little bird song melody before I play the next song,” says Moore.

“It’s a fun thing to do, to use the bar when it’s closed,” says Estes one night as he expertly pulls a Guinness from the taps at The Wren. “You get a lot of locals in here for it,” he continues, swinging aside a curtain at the corner of the bar—revealing the house turntable and a stack of vinyl underneath.

Back at El Suprimo, Moore points to the 45-disc sleeve he’d made for the Society that he displays to advertise the listening parties. It showcases a Michelangelo-inspired songbird on the front, a list of the tunes he’s prone to spinning—John Fahey, Tawny Owl, Nymphs & Satyrs—on the back.

His shop is a listening party all itself, minus the beer and whiskey. He has, he says, 14,000 more records at home, as well as a self-built record cleaner at the shop. It’s an ultrasonic 40-kilowat water-bath machine that he fashioned with the help of a shish-kabob skewer and a rotisserie motor.

“A big part of the business is restoring,” he says, playing a rare Coltrane LP that he recently fixed.

His nights at The Wren are not about the restoration of records, necessarily, but of the restoration of community, of listening, of attention. And, yes, of a few pints and a few birds.

Pavlina Ilieva remembers when she first became aware of the old Enoch Pratt Free Library Branch No. 19 on South Ann Street, a few blocks north of the Fells Point waterfront. For a decade or so, Ilieva, who runs the Baltimore architecture studio PI.KL with her husband Kuo Pao Lian, would walk their dogs past the circa-1922 building on her way to get coffee at the Daily Grind.

She watched as the historic brick structure, which closed as a library in 2001 and then housed the nonprofit Education Based Latino Outreach center, struggled with maintenance and funding, ultimately being abandoned in 2018. Weeds overran the alleys and back lot; roof leaks degraded the ceilings, leaving cratered holes and paint peeling like laundry.

“It got to a point where the building was dangerous—it was full of black mold,” says Lian, recalling that one time the basement was three feet underwater. “And there was this morning when I just had this moment of like, how long has this been this way; why is it still sitting here?” says Ilieva.

She and Lian contacted the city to ask about the property and learned that they were taking proposals. So they submitted one, won the bid, and, in 2023, bought both the former library and the empty lot behind it.

The pair—who met in architecture school, settled in Fells Point, taught at Morgan State University (Ilieva) and MICA (Lian), and founded PI.KL (their initials) in 2010—have a lot of experience with restoring and developing old Baltimore spaces. They restored the circa-1786 Broadway Market. They converted an old auto body shop into R. House, Remington’s bustling food hall. And they recently completed Cedar House, the new events space connected to Patterson Park’s historic White House.

For the couple, and their three-member team, it’s about more than just fixing old buildings or erecting new ones.

“It’s about creating community through structures,” says Lian, who describes the “adaptive reuse” process as transforming introverted spaces into extroverted ones.

“IT’S ABOUT CREATING COMMUNITY THROUGH STRUCTURES.”

He envisions a warehouse or an old building as an enclosed box; the idea is to open it. “Let people come in and find creative ways to use it.”

“We did not build this building,” says Lian of what is now Library 19. “We’re the architects that were used to help bring it back to life.”

“The vision was always to grow the project with the neighborhood,” says Ilieva, and that now includes not only PI.KL’s new light-filled offices on the second floor, but an adjoining room that has been transformed into an archive called the Reference Collection, an open space lined with shelving that serves as a museum of sorts, housing artifacts from Good Neighbor and art-house books, and also hosts the occasional salon with creative agency partners, Cohere.

The cozy third floor is rented out to the wellness studio Casa de Luz. And the basement—once flooded and now filled with long tables, upholstered chairs, wooden benches, and high-window light—is an events space that recently hosted an Equitea pop-up and a winter market featuring Local Stitch, Cocina Luchadoras, Greedy Reads, and more.

“The neighborhood needs things that are not restaurants and bars and stores, where you don’t have to feel like you have to buy something,” says Ilieva.

Next comes further development, maybe some permanent businesses or an incubator, then a garden behind the library that will connect to another structure behind it and then to Register Street, effectively joining both ends of the block into a thoroughfare composed of public-facing spaces.

“What does a library do?” asks Lian, sitting downstairs at one of the long basement tables next to a woman on a laptop sipping Mexican cocoa. “Could we bring people together, create a new sort of collective that starts to support what Fells Point is? We would love to be a little village here.”

Because libraries have always housed villages, either at tables or on shelves.

Just in time to buoy the January blues comes Baltimore Restaurant Week, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year from Jan. 23 to Feb. 1. Organized by Downtown Partnership of Baltimore and Visit Baltimore, it’s a week devoted to prix-fixe specials from some 100 of the city’s restaurants. Here are a few things to remember as the dining promotion kicks off:

Exploring is encouraged.
It’s a great time to explore places you haven’t been before, or hit up those you haven’t frequented for a while. It’s also a good way for restaurants to bring folks in during what is traditionally a lean time and appeal to newcomers—think of it as gateway dining.

Newcomers are going to invade your favorite spots.
This also means that regulars may want to take a break from their usual spots, as there may be more crowds than usual, and either stay home and cook for a change—or get on the bandwagon and do some exploring themselves. (I have never been a fan of Restaurant Weeks, preferring to dine out on Tuesdays just after doors open, as I don’t like crowds or prix-fixe menus, but I know I’m an anomaly.)

Research is key. 
If you do decide to go, a bit of legwork is recommended. Scan websites and check out the special menus before you go, as you want to be sure that what’s on the Restaurant Week menu syncs with your dietary preferences. Not a carnivore or a soup fan? You may not want what’s on offer at one place, but might find exactly what you do want at another.

Look at pics.
You can also check Instagram and TikTok, as many restaurants showcase their recent or classic dishes and give frequent updates. It’s also fun to have visual aids before you shell out for dinner. That said, note that some dishes the restaurants are best known for may not be on the Restaurant Week menu.

Know your budget.
Financially, Restaurant Week is a great time to finally splurge on a place that’s always seemed a bit out of reach, or gives you a nudge if you need that bit of bargain-hunting to appeal to your dinner (or brunch or lunch) mates. Some spots even have wine pairings as part of the set menus. Either way, do some research first—it’ll likely pay off as much as any discount on dinner.

The first time you walk into Steak N’ Bone, the well-appointed Korean barbecue restaurant housed in a Canton rowhouse, of all places, it might be because you’re desperate for a bubbling cauldron of kimchi-jjigae stew without having to drive to Station North or Catonsville or even Virginia.

The second time, you might do it right with an all-you-can-eat party, or perhaps a friends-and-family dinner, with all the grilled meats and banchan, chased down with some Korean beer and shots of soju.

The third time, maybe you’ll walk in again and order some to-go dishes or sit in the back dining room during the day, before the late-night folks arrive, just to have the outstanding crunchy seafood pancakes.

This isn’t the first restaurant to be operated out of this location, on the corner of Streeper and O’Donnell, just a block or so south of Café Dear Leon (and its permanent crab-bagel line), but it’s certainly the first Korean BBQ spot.

Open since September of 2024, the space has been beautifully updated, with wooden paneling and lots of windows that make it seem more like a lofty cabin than a barbecue joint. Don’t miss the huge kelly-green soju frog sitting on the bar guarding the impressive collection of liquor bottles, not just because it’s impressive, but because it reminds you to order soju—a distilled spirit made from rice, wheat, or barley and the national drink of Korea. (More on that later.)

Steak N’ Bone is owned and operated by Young Lee—who’s also involved with the hugely popular Bonchon Korean Fried Chicken and who is Korean-Argentine, which means he understands steak better than you do—with the considerable help of his nephew Kevin Lee, who’s also the manager and often your server.

“My parents are into it as well,” says Kevin of his uncle’s restaurant one evening, as he expertly scissors sizzling pork belly, brisket, and bone-in short ribs under one of the vertically moveable vents that make the restaurant look less like a KBBQ joint than a Quentin Tarantino set.

“It’s a small family business,” he says, while he migrates the meat off the fire and adds whole garlic cloves and jalapeños to the grill. Meanwhile, the small dishes of banchan are replenished and joined by bowls of rice, some pretty wonderful cheesy corn, more bubbling kimchi-jjigae, a bowl of lettuce leaves like a farmer’s bouquet with which to make ad hoc wraps, and that seafood pancake, a crispy, crunchy, blissful disk of seafood and greenery that comes topped with a bowl of dipping sauce.

If you ask nicely, Kevin will swing by and cut up your bits of sizzled steak and maybe work more magic—squeezing lemon on them and dusting them with Maldon salt.

When not busy doing other owner-related things, Young can often be found upstairs pretending to be Sweeney Todd—thinly slicing cuts of meat on a massive machine, or sourcing the steaks themselves, which come from local farms and are dry-aged for 28 or more days. It is those steaks, of course, that determined both the restaurant’s name and the fact that you will, if you get the bone-in option, end up with an actual bone smoking on your table’s hubcap-sized grill.

That smoke is pretty fun itself, and creates its own weather systems in the dining rooms—there are a few of them, both in the main street-level and upstairs. (There is also, amazingly, an actual dumbwaiter in the kitchen.)

There are more things on the menu that should be eaten, including yukhoe, which is the Korean iteration of steak tartare, an egg soufflé, and a terrific rendition of bulgogi. And there are things to order from the bar, which is well-stocked, as Young was once, conveniently, a liquor distributor. Which brings us back to soju.

We highly suggest ordering a bottle, even if you don’t drink much, because maybe either Young or Kevin or someone else might do this marvelous trick, in which they swirl the bottle around until an actual funnel forms inside, like a tiny tornado.

It’s a fitting conclusion to a marvelous meal—a bit of showmanship not unlike having your server bestow a martini sidecar or a perfectly pulled espresso—and yet another reason to rejoice in the fact that you don’t have to drive home from Ellicott City for your KBBQ fix.

STEAK N’ BONE: 2821 O’Donnell St., 443-401-2288. HOURS: Sun. Thurs. 11 a.m.-9 p.m., Fri.-Sat. 11 a.m.-9:30 p.m. PRICES: Appetizers: $10; mains: $13-25; a la carte: $15-42; AYCE: varies. AMBIANCE: Woodsy Canton corner rowhouse and serious bar.

The Sichuan dish called “sauerkraut fish” might not appeal to many folks unfamiliar with the more agreeable Mandarin term, suancai yu, or the dish itself, a bowl of tender whitefish in a slightly sour broth made from pickled mustard greens.

Typically prepared with filets of grass carp, snakehead, basa, or flounder and enriched with ginger and garlic, plus the pickled vegetables that give the soup its sourness, the soup is considered one of Chongqing’s top 10 classic dishes. But despite its popularity, suancai yu isn’t found on that many of the Chinese restaurant menus around Baltimore, which tend to favor shuizhu yu (Sichuan water-boiled fish), the version charged with either Sichuan green peppercorns or a mind-blowing amount of red chiles.

Lucky for us, this changed recently, with the July opening of Fish With You in Ellicott City. It is the first Maryland location of a wildly popular suancai yu chain that first launched in Beijing in 2017 and that now boasts more than 2,500 shops worldwide, spanning from Brooklyn in New York City and a few in Los Angeles, to Vancouver, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and Dubai.

Fish With You is a cheerful, tidy place, with Orioles-orange chairs, a flatscreen displaying gorgeous bowls of soup, a giant orange blow-up fish as a kind of inanimate concierge, plus hand-held fish-shaped fans for those choosing spicier items on the menu—also helpful in summer heatwaves.

A row of rice cookers is stationed near the counter, ensuring that your bowls of the rice that traditionally accompanies the soups—either basic white or the blissful charcoal-colored combination of barley/peanuts/black rice—are delivered warm. And the small tables each sport drawers filled with napkins and chopsticks. It’s a remarkably cozy set-up.

Then there’s the sauerkraut soup itself, which, it should be said, comes in a bowl the size of a hubcap. This is standard: The bowls of shuizhu yu at both NiHao and Lao Sze Chuan are massive, as they are at Red Pepper Sichuan Bistro and its sister restaurants, Orient Express and Tea Horse, all three of which have not only shuizhu yu but excellent iterations of suancai yu.

At Fish With You, the soup is made with ribbons of snakehead, which is a nice touch for locals who are familiar with the invasive but delicious fish. Snakehead is indigenous to China, so it’s traditionally used in soups. And it’s splendid here, tender and mild enough to play off nicely against the broth’s sourness. The soup is both spiced and decorated with a restrained amount of crimson chiles and a center pile of thinly sliced scallions and threaded not only with pickled greens but with nearly invisible glass noodles. A pretty dusting of sesame seeds finishes things off.

There are other variations of suancai yu on the glossy menu, made with tomatoes, additional Sichuan peppercorns—there were once garnishing sprigs of fresh Sichuan peppercorns, too, but apparently the restaurant can’t import them anymore—red chiles, lemons, scallion broth, or basa (a freshwater catfish) rather than snakehead. There are additional items: beef soup, fried pork soup, Taiwanese sausage, grilled squid skewers, plus desserts (coconut lava balls, glutinous rice cakes), teas, and many, many add-ons for your bowls, should your soup require quail eggs, say, or enoki mushrooms.

With a friendly atmosphere and all those wonderful soups, Fish With You is a splendid addition to Baltimore National Pike’s strip-mall restaurant row. And for a region with a longtime love for sauerkraut, it seems natural, even inevitable, to have a restaurant devoted to the Sichuan bowls. No, it’s not the same as what Baltimoreans grew up eating at Thanksgiving, but it somehow feels right at home.

FISH WITH YOU: 10040 Baltimore National Pike, Ellicott City, 443-816-3737. HOURS: Sun.-Thurs. 11 a.m.-9 p.m., Fri.-Sat. 11 a.m.-9:30 p.m.
PRICES: Soups: $14.95-17.95; appetizers: $3.95-6.95; mains: $12.95 26.95; desserts: $6.95. AMBIANCE: Cheery food court.

Sometimes the most comforting food comes in the form of a bowl of spicy noodles and a basket of soup dumplings—that blissful Shanghainese invention in which hot broth is somehow pocketed inside steamed dumplings.

In a perfect world, Chinese dumpling shops would be on every street corner in Baltimore. But lucky for us all, Yu Noodles, a Chongqing noodle and dumpling house, opened on York Road, just south of the county line, about six months ago.

What is now a small DMV-centered noodle chain, Yu Noodles began when Tony Cai and Andy Qiu opened their first shop in Rockville in 2018. Since then, Yu has expanded to locations in the D.C. suburbs of Virginia, plus Silver Spring and Ardmore, Pennsylvania. The Baltimore location is the newest, for which those of us who prefer to eat closer to home are very grateful. (Yu, by the way, is the recognized abbreviation of Chongqing, coming from Yuzhong, now the central district of Chongqing—the municipality in southwestern China known for its chile-heated cuisine.)

Tucked into a strip mall about a half-mile north of the Senator Theatre, Yu Noodles has a surprisingly roomy and elegant dining room, with cozy booths and wood-paneled walls, plus a menu that’s impressively expansive. There are the addictive xiaolongbao (xlb)—those soup dumplings—in four iterations, plus bowls of Chongqing and Sichuan noodles, rice bowls, and an entire dim sum menu featuring scallion pancakes, pork bao, wontons, pan-fried dumplings, and superb packages of sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves. This had us particularly excited, because, with the exception of the marvelous dim sum (AYCE weekend brunch!) at NiHao in Canton, there is, sadly, almost no dim sum this far east of Ellicott City.

Xlb are tiny miracles. The steamed dumplings envelop a filling—pork is classic, but Yu also has spicy pork, shrimp, and chicken, which come in various pretty colors—and, somehow, a few spoonfuls of very hot soup broth. (The technique involves chilling collagen-rich broth into jelly, which can then be wrapped.)

They typically arrive in the baskets in which they are steamed, and eating them is something of a happily practiced skill. You need to lift them from their basket without puncturing the dumplings’ thin skin, so doing this with your fingers, rather than chopsticks, is more effective, even if it’s hotter. There will be spoons to help with the slurping, as well as accompanying tiny dishes of soy sauce with threads of fresh ginger.

And the soup, it should be said, can be scaldingly hot. At one splendid restaurant in L.A.’s San Gabriel Valley, the xlb come not only in the traditional bite-size dumplings, but in fantastically large ones the size of tea-cup saucers. These are delivered with boba straws to suck out the soup, which makes sense if you think about it. Little xlb do not require boba straws, though Yu has a strong beverage menu, so you can always give it a try.

The best soup dumplings manage the trick of enclosing the fillings, and that soup, with wrappers that are nearly paper-thin. The thicker the wrappers, the less magical and more mundane the dumplings become. Yu’s dumplings are marvelous, dexterously made and come six to a basket. And although it’s tempting just to order all the baskets—24 would beat my daughter’s record of 19—the rest of the menu is just as good.

There are bowls of cold noodles sluiced with sesame paste and shrimp, or black vinegar and chicken, or torqued with extra spice, or intestines, if that’s your thing. And there’s a bowl of Yibin noodles, an iteration of dan dan mien, that hails from the Sichuan city that gives the dish its name.

The best bowl in my mind, though, is the Chongqing noodles: bouncy threads tangled around bok choy, cabbage, and peanuts, drenched in a dense, soulful soup loaded with but not overwhelmed by spice. The bowl arrives topped with a hard-fried egg thatched with scallions. It is comfort food at its finest—though a few more dumplings won’t hurt.

There are other fun things on the menu—potatoes cut into spirals and doused with cheese or plums, chicken feet, even somehow Buffalo wings with hot sauce. But it is the soup dumplings and noodles, all handmade and remarkably budget-friendly, that some of us will trek back for—especially as that trek is within city limits.

The refrigerators are stationed all over the city. They come in varying sizes, some built into public shelving for canned goods, others standalone, many painted or decorated and looking more like art installations than food banks. They’re often remarkably beautiful, fitting into a Baltimore landscape already enhanced with salt boxes and murals and Little Free Library huts.

Just north of Patterson Park, there’s a mini-fridge, painted turquoise with the face of a cat. In Curtis Bay, another one is built into burgundy shelves stacked with canned goods and books in front of a community garden. In Hamilton, another, tucked inside a white-picket shed the size of a doghouse. And in Station North, next to another community garden, a full-size fridge is adorned with a stunning orange-headed bird, its wings spanning the breadth of the door.

Though the grassroots network started in February, by late summer the Bmore Community Fridge Network (BCFN) had 17 fridges installed around the city, plus 11 food pantries and three pet pantries, with more in the works.

Started by four women to address growing food insecurity around Baltimore, BCFN is not a nonprofit, nor does it rely on city or government funding of any kind. Rather, it was founded by a group of volunteers who coordinate free food, meals, and other resources across the Baltimore area.

Many of them met for the first time at their first community meeting, held the first weekend of August. Canton resident Julie Kichline, who owns Kik-line Design; Liz Miller, a Baltimore County Public Schools art teacher; retired consultant Lila Perilloux, from Anne Arundel County; and Marci Yankelov, a REALTOR® from Bolton Hill, each came to the project for varying reasons, but all share the same goal: to do something about the growing issue of hunger in Baltimore.

Until recently, the fridge network was an ad hoc system that people—both those who needed food and those who supplied it—discovered through word of mouth or accident. Most fridges are donated by either individuals or businesses, set up on someone’s front yard, and filled and refilled when needed. A loaf of bread, homemade soup in Tupperware, takeout Chinese food, a stack of sandwiches.

“That’s not good enough, in our day and age,” Miller says of that haphazard approach.

“I just kept thinking, there are a lot of resources, but it doesn’t seem like they’re connected,” says Yankelov, a longtime food pantry volunteer who co-founded the Baltimore Supper Club, a cooking group with thousands of members.

She was increasingly frustrated by food waste and disorganization. People wanting food would ask her to deliver a pizza or call her up at one in the morning to see if she could bring dinner. Meanwhile, food insecurity was growing, people were being laid off in droves, and funding was being cut.

So the BCFN was born, given a name and a home on Facebook, where volunteers post messages and news, as well as a map of locations, links to donation and sponsorship forms, and other helpful information. It’s still a grassroots network, a system of community organizers and volunteers, and it receives no funding but relies on generosity and donations—of food and resources, of the refrigerators themselves, and of time and spirit.

And the need is greater than ever. A 2024 Johns Hopkins study found that 28 percent of Baltimore-area residents reported experiencing food insecurity, defined as not having consistent access to quality food on any given day. Only 15 percent of those experiencing food insecurity are also unhoused, and, according to the Maryland Food Bank, nearly 39 percent of food-insecure Marylanders have too high an income to qualify for government assistance.

Recently, the issue has gotten even more acute, given soaring grocery prices and federal cuts to food-assistance programs. A 2023 USDA study put the number of food-insecure households that have children at more than 82 percent.

A 2024 JOHNS HOPKINS STUDY FOUND THAT 28 PERCENT OF BALTIMORE-AREA RESIDENTS REPORTED EXPERIENCING FOOD INSECURITY.

Community fridges gained popularity during the COVID pandemic, when grocery shelves emptied, food insecurity rates rose, and many people found themselves either out of work, stuck at home, or both. Many cities, from New York to Chicago, began fridge networks. Both Miller and Perilloux point to New Orleans—where Perilloux has lived and volunteered—as a successful model.

How many community fridges or community fridge networks exist isn’t clear, although the database Freedge, which tracks them and offers support and even templates for building a “fridge hut,” lists close to 400 in the U.S. with more worldwide. (The UK, which also has a food system in crisis, has an estimated 700 community fridges.)

A fridge hut is a necessary component, a way not only to protect the appliance itself but to buttress it, often literally, with shelves or cabinets for other items like canned goods, books, even pet supplies. In Hamilton, one volunteer built a housing unit, of sorts, to store the fridge. Miller arranged for a donated refrigerator, dropped it off, “And everybody in the neighborhood was like, ‘Is this a rabbit hutch?’”

The BCFN Facebook page reads like the local grassroots organization it is. “Major discounts on meat this morning at Safeway and I’ve been cooking all day!!” one volunteer posts. “If anyone is inspired to cook a bunch of eggplants, I’d be happy to get them to you tomorrow or this weekend. I also have some summer squash, basil, cucumbers, and jalapeños,” posts another. “I spent a few hours with some of the Youth Works young people re-portioning large trays of rescued Chinese food into containers. We have 30+ meals,” Yankelov writes. “Help! I’m at the rec center at Bentalou and Baker Sts. Which fridges should I drop to? These are like bagged lunches…a lot of them,” another voice chimes in.

It’s an informal web of generosity, commitment, effort, and time, with volunteers working together to stock the fridges and pantries across the city when and however they can. Various businesses and organizations donate some of the food; volunteers buy ingredients on sale or harvest produce from their own or community gardens. One day it might be a few hundred bagels, another a weekly donation from Panera. Still another, a box of pastries, a sale at Aldi, an Amazon ingredient wish list that translated into a box of homemade sandwiches.

Volunteers source containers and shelf-stable items, post messages to coordinate efforts, and regularly monitor the fridges. Someone cleans out wilted vegetables; another makes sure that bags of donated baked items are distributed among many fridges rather than dropped off at one.

“We’re encouraging people to label foods, to date the foods, to note if there are any allergens,” says Perilloux, who adds that she’s been adding vegetarian meals to her repertoire since she realized the need for them.

“The demographics of the fridges are all different,” she explains, noting that they’ll leave flatware at some sites for those without kitchens.

“We’re not responsible for starting from the ground up,” says Miller, “but we do house the map, and anytime we learn of a fridge or a pantry, we add it to the map.”

Some of the fridges were already extant, either set up by someone with an extra unit on their property, as part of a pre-existing organization—as with the Govans fridge, set up by a partnership between Loyola University and Calming Leaf Foundation—or moved by BCFN from another site. There’s also signage now, as well as QR codes that link the sites so that those who need food and those who want to help can connect.

“You can find the other locations, and you can learn that it’s just part of a larger movement,” says Miller. “You’re not alone.”

Dallas Fitzsimmons, an auto mechanic who’s lived in Poplar Grove for the last four years, still visits the fridge on Ashburton Street. After a catastrophic car accident, he was hospitalized for two years and lost everything he owned.

“Nothing but the clothes on my back and some wrenches and a suitcase,” he says. “When I moved in here, I ate out of that refrigerator about three days a week.”

Now back on his feet, Fitzsimmons has restarted his business and gives back to the community. “It brings me to tears,” he says now. “That refrigerator kept me from starving.”

The BCFN hopes to organize a system without giving up its grassroots community to help those in need. They don’t have a website; they’ve resisted becoming a nonprofit.

“We do everything without money,” says Miller, who admits she doesn’t know how much food makes its way through the system. But she prefers it that way. BCFN functions more like a barter system than an organization with paid employees, record keeping—and bureaucratic red tape.

“We had a guy, he lost his house, and he was like, ‘I have a full-size freezer and a full-size fridge, and it’s full of food, and we gotta be out in three days. So anybody who wants to come by, DM me.’”

Not only did the food get used, but volunteers came together to help him find a truck, a storage unit. “People were coming through for him. And at the same time, he’s busy coming through for others.”

As BCFN co-founder Kichline puts it: “Sometimes we help, sometimes we need help, and sometimes it’s both.”

“SOMETIMES WE HELP, SOMETIMES WE NEED HELP, AND SOMETIMES IT’S BOTH.”

In the back of Red Emma’s, the Waverly worker-cooperative bookstore and cafe, past rows of tables with folks on laptops with oat-milk lattes and tempeh BLTs, a large white fridge sits next to loaded bookshelves and a rack of clothes, all free for anyone who needs them, as are the contents of the refrigerator.

It’s a Waverly Community Fridge that started in January, a month before the BCFN was formed, and isn’t run by Red Emma’s so much as overseen by the bookstore and cafe staff.

“It’s here, it’s part of the network insofar as it helps people get access and know where they are,” says Red Emma’s Taylor Morgan. “The handy thing about having a restaurant and not wanting to have food waste is that whenever we have leftover food, we can package it up and put it in the fridge.”

As Red Emma’s already had a resource center for food, clothing, and hygiene and health supplies, it made sense to put the community fridge inside there, too. It was also, well, inside.

“Outside is difficult because it’s harder to monitor the cleanliness of it. The elements affect the fridge,” says Morgan.

There can also be issues with property ownership and electricity bills. Another plus with Red Emma’s is that it already functions as a community center, so it’s easy for folks to walk past the brick walls and Edison-bulb lighting and either drop food off or collect it.

“There’s no stipulations on who can put the stuff in the fridge and who can take the stuff out,” says Morgan. “And that’s our concept around mutual aid.”

On any given day, Red Emma’s might package up soup or chili or pastries that haven’t sold by closing time. If there’s a catered event at the restaurant, leftover platters might be donated. Other restaurants also have the option of bringing by leftover food, knowing that Red Emma’s can handle the items.

“There is such a demand,” Morgan says. “People of all ages—people with kids, elderly people—come here every day. We have regulars.”

“Food tends to not sit in any of the refrigerators. I mean, we can’t keep them filled,” says Perilloux. “I put 23 meals in a fridge yesterday morning, and they were gone in less than 30 minutes. I feel like, you know, we can’t do enough. We just cannot keep these fridges stocked. I went to the Govans fridge once, and there was a mom just sitting on the curb with her two kids, and she said, ‘Oh, I was wondering if somebody was going to come today.’”

“Everybody comes, the community, the church, so many people come,” says Val Clark, of the Filbert Street fridge in Curtis Bay. “I’ve been putting in, taking out, putting in, taking out. I probably do more putting in than taking out,” says Clark, a New Orleans native who moved to Baltimore in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and lives across the street from the Filbert Street site, which includes not only a community garden but an apiary and both chickens and goats.

“WHEN I MOVED IN HERE, I ATE OUT OF THAT REFRIGERATOR ABOUT THREE DAYS A WEEK.”

Jim Metz, a Fallston retiree, got involved with the BCFN after doing work for decades with both animal rescue and food donation. Between the shopping, making sandwiches and meals at home, and dropping off food, he spends about 30 hours a week volunteering.

“I saw [Perilloux’s Facebook] post and I thought, ‘Here’s something that I can do,’” he says. “My wife has been a social worker in the city forever, and I hear her stories about all the stuff that’s happening now, so I do whatever I can.”

Metz goes to various sites throughout the city, sometimes stopping at a few on each trip. “The fridge I go to first is empty, and I’ll fill it, and keep track on Facebook,” he says.

Metz juggles occasional donations but mostly pays for everything himself, combining grocery-store sale items plus vegetables and eggs he might get from friends with gardens and chickens. “And sometimes, you know, I barely get back into the car and fix my pictures to post, and there’s a couple people walking [to the fridge] from different directions. So yeah, we’re trying to help where we can.”

The BCFN volunteers wear many hats (metaphorical hats, often sun hats), as they coordinate food distribution through a web of partnerships, from private citizens to businesses to food banks.

“We’re not a nonprofit and I don’t know that we’ll ever be,” says Perilloux, who also moderates the Facebook group Feeding Baltimore, “but a lot of our donations get funneled through Leftover Love to the fridges.”

Omar Tarabishi co-founded the nonprofit Leftover Love at the beginning of 2024 to rescue leftover food from local businesses, working to collect donations and transport them to those in need. To date, the organization has rescued more than 98,000 pounds of food. But while this works well with larger donations, it becomes problematic with smaller ones.

So Tarabishi began filling the Linwood Community Fridge, which is near his Highlandtown home. “It’s been really great, because sometimes we get more of those smaller donations, and it doesn’t make sense for us to drop off at a large institution like Helping Up Mission or Charm City Care Connection or The Baltimore Station for veterans. Bringing a small bag of Jamaican patties to feed 500 men doesn’t make sense, right? So we would donate to a lot of these community fridges.”

Tarabishi, in turn, spread the word of the community fridges to his larger network. “We’ve put some of our donors and volunteers in touch with these closer fridges, to stock Ashburn, to stock Reisterstown, to stock Curtis Bay, as well as others all over Baltimore.”

He gives a lot of credit to the volunteers at BCFN for linking up the system. “People come to us because they’ve heard of BCFN, and they want to rescue the food to put in other BCFN fridges. We’re addressing food insecurity and food waste in Baltimore together, as well as just connecting neighbors.

“They can operate in the gray spaces or in the loopholes,” Tarabishi says of the grassroots network’s ability to maneuver outside the restrictions of larger operations that are tied to strict regulations. “They kind of saved us.”

Fridge by fridge, they’re saving a lot of us.