Little Italy's Bocce Courts Host Popular Evening Leagues

The gyros are gone but lake trout has been added to the bill of fare. The booths and the counter are the same. Hanging over the grill is a row of new flatscreen TVs, as though whatever the talking heads are yakking about is more important than what the bus driver in for an egg sandwich is telling the school teacher on the next stool.

Best of all, “His Royal Grillness”—“Mr. Bruce,” the king with his spatula scepter—is back on the short order line, turning out pancakes, omelets, and home fries.

All is well again at the corner of Howard and 25th streets in North Baltimore, where, just before Thanksgiving last year, the New Wyman Park Restaurant closed after 80 years. In early October, new ownership fired up the stoves and it debuted as Kay’s Place.

“I see new faces but my old customers are coming back,” said cook Bruce Purnell, 70, a two-decade veteran of the New Wyman when it was owned by Spiro Conits, who stopped by for a peek at his old haunt the other day.

One of the new faces learning the diner trade is waitress and Southwestern High School Class of ’85 graduate Daphney Jones. Asked what the hardest part of her job was, Jones said, “dealing with Bruce.”

They both laughed and got back to work, Jones writing the tickets and Purnell putting them above the grill in the order they came in: waffles, shrimp and grits, and the all-purpose egg sandwich with full strips of bacon hanging over the side.

The owner is Cia Carter, 36, the chef/entrepreneur behind the Miss Carter’s Kitchen restaurants at Clay and Liberty Streets downtown (now under renovation) and on Edmondson Avenue. Kay’s Place is named for Carter’s finance and business partner, 45-year-old Kevin Maultsby.

“He knew the history of this place,” Carter said. “He knew they did a good business. People came in out of nowhere when we opened up. Some of them got on the phone to tell people the place was open again.”

Like many diner owners, Carter does business from a booth in the back. “I try to make my presence known every day,” she said. With her sleeves rolled up as she goes over paperwork, a tattoo of the word “Loyalty” in cursive is visible on the inside of her left arm.

“Loyalty to myself,” she explained, “and the people I love.”

In the first weeks that Kay’s Place filled the void left by the Wyman, Carter also received a handful of reporters looking to document the changing of the guard. Though now spiced with soul instead of olive oil and lemon, Carter’s classic and comforting menu is pretty much the same. For a while, it will be heavy on breakfast.

A graduate of Lincoln Tech Culinary Institute in Howard County, Carter has added candied yams, collard greens (seasoned with neck bones), cajun fried fish and grits, and a chicken wing and cheeseburger combo special.

Though it was well before noon, South Baltimore author Mark Hannon had the wing and burger lunch special not long ago. “I wish I hadn’t already eaten breakfast because the choices around me looked so good,” Hannon said.

Customers who have enjoyed the dishes at Carter’s other restaurants have included Michael K. Williams, the recently deceased actor famous for portraying Omar on The Wire, whom, she said, ordered a takeout salmon dinner. Ravens superstar quarterback Lamar Jackson has also been sighted at Miss Carter’s Kitchen on Edmondson Avenue.

“I was at the hairdresser when they called me and I flew out of the chair to get over there,” Carter said. “He wanted banana pudding, but I didn’t have the ingredients on hand.” (Who knows, maybe one day you’ll see Jackson on a stool at 25th and Howard shooting the breeze with Bruce.)

When the New Wyman closed, customer after customer had the same thing to say, dozens of spins on the same thing: “I just felt extra-Baltimore there…”

Noted Baltimore writer and foodie Richard Gorelick stopped in for an egg sandwich the week that Kay’s Place opened and said that the civic vibe endures.

“When people feel good about Baltimore, they have in their minds places like New Wyman Park and Kay’s Place,” Gorelick said. “Places at crossroads can be like that, because so many people feel like members in good standing.”

It’s an accolade of the highest caliber and, the way people eat these days, one you don’t hear much anymore: “They made the best pea soup of anyone next to my mother…”

“They” refers to the generations of cooks at the New Wyman Park Restaurant, late of 25th and Howard Streets. Mom is Audrey Soutiere Cimino, the 75-year-old mother of B. Thomas Rinaldi, pea soup connoisseur.

Rinaldi ate his last bowls of pea soup at the Wyman Park diner—a Baltimore landmark since the eve of World War II—before it closed for good the day before Thanksgiving.

“Their pea soup was yummy, stick to your ribs—thick with bits of ham,” said Rinaldi, known to friends as Tommy. “Not everyone likes peas so they didn’t always have it, but when they did I would get extra helpings and take some home.”

Rinaldi began going to the Wyman diner as a kid in the 1970s when his father, Dr. Robert T. Rinaldi, was assistant superintendent of Baltimore City Public Schools. Back then, school headquarters was a few blocks east of the diner on 25th Street.

It was the kind of place, said one of the many longtime customers who stopped in for goodbye and one last meal, where you could eavesdrop on three disgraced alumni of the Maryland General Assembly breaking bread in one of the narrow diner’s eight booths.

The kind of place where you could stand front-to-back and shoulder-to-shoulder with bus drivers, auto mechanics, school teachers, clerks at the neighborhood locksmith, and DJs from WYPR from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m., six days a week.

“It was a great place to run into a who’s who of Baltimore,” said Rinaldi, recently retired from the Baltimore City Department of Social Services. “Judges, power lawyers, [and artists], all having cutting edge conversations about politics, sports, jurisprudence, and public policy.”

All complete with news-of-the-day schtick, with cooks cracking eggs and cracking wise at the grill behind a counter with nine deco swivel stools. The most legendary cook of recent memory was Bruce Purnell, who said he worked the grill for the past 17 years and didn’t see the price of an omelette go up more than a buck or so in that time.

Said Remington resident Lynda Gomeringer, who began patronizing the diner when she moved to the neighborhood in 2005: “Listening to Bruce expound on the world and hit zingers out of the park was delicious.”

Purnell was so charismatic that local poet Shirley Brewer wrote an ode to him: “His Royal Grillness.” “A spatula instead of a scepter, a king without a crown,” wrote Brewer. “…the menu sizzles, heads of lettuce ready to roll…hey sugar loaf, you want coffee in your cream?”

To see the show up close, you just squeezed in sideways at the counter when the place was packed, which was often. It was a six-day-a-week drama worthy of a soundtrack by Tom Waits.

“You could get a bacon sandwich—not a BLT, just bacon,” said Steve E. Estes, an artist living nearby.

Adds Lynne Heneson, a longtime customer: “My father owned a drugstore at Charles and 25th, it’s now a junk shop. When he was trying to lose weight he’d order a plain burger with no bun every day for lunch. And it worked!”

The diner dates back to 1939, when it was founded along a streetcar line as the Wyman Park Restaurant by Michael Nikoludis and the former Mary Gianoulis—Greek immigrants who arrived separately from the island of Chios about the time of the First World War.

Through three different owners, all Greek or Greek-American, business was brisk, as it was right up to the end.

“My mom would come home from Eastern High School when she was about 13, put her books on the back steps leading upstairs where they lived, and help out in the restaurant,” said Michele Andriotis Tsonis, granddaughter of the founders. “My grandparents had a red-headed waitress for years who didn’t take no stuff from anybody. If she saw a regular crossing 25th Street, she’d have their coffee waiting the way they like it when they walked in the door.”

After the Nikoludis family left in 1982, they sold to the late Michael J. Fochios, whose father, Nicholas, had worked alongside the original owners. Nick had married one of Nikoludis’ daughters, Evelyn. The other Nikoludis daughter, Eva, was Michele Tsonis’ mother.

“So many of [my grandparents’] grandchildren and cousins worked there,” adds Tsonis, a longtime Lutherville resident who has been absent from the diner for many years. “I remember heaping plates of roast turkey with mashed potatoes and gravy.”

Ah, that classic brown diner gravy, which oldtimers used to say was delivered to Greek restaurants throughout Baltimore—from the long gone Crown Steak House at Eastern Avenue and Newkirk Street to the still percolating Sip & Bite in Canton—by tanker trucks. Gravy on turkey, on french fries, on roast beef.

“On meatloaf,” enthused musician Robert J. Friedman, who not only stopped in for a final meal on the last day but brought his daughters along to experience a historic event. “Meatloaf, green beans, mashed potatoes, lots of gravy—always the gravy!” said Friedman, a veteran Baltimore musician known as “Beefalo Bob.”

Friedman’s daughters, Julianne, 20, and Sarah, 16, he said, “took home leftovers and loved the crazy finality of the last day. I thanked the crew for all their years of excellent work and left a big tip. It was a heartbreaker.”

The guy who locked up for the last time on November 25—after posing for photos with customers who would have talked him out of it if they could—is Spiro Conits, 55. Conits took over the restaurant with his late father in 1989, christening the joint “New Wyman Park Restaurant.”

The decision to sell, Conits said, was not related to the COVID-19 pandemic. He’s simply ready, he said, not to do much of anything at all.

A resident of Dulaney Valley and graduate of Towson High School, Conits was both willing to answer questions while not having much to say regarding the new owner of the business. It is believed that the location will remain an eatery of some sort and that it will not be operated by Greeks.

Regulars, who fear that the days of split pea soup and open-faced roast beef sandwiches are gone for good from the corner, will have to wait to see what will take its place.

“I spent many hours at the counter, always an egg sandwich and a cup of coffee,” said Jerome C. Gray, a Baltimore architect and watercolor artist. “Only a few places left in town like it. Whether it was a politician or just somebody who needed a bite while trying to get from Point A to Point B. No pretense and no posing. Just a joint.”

John Brothers ate his last meal at the New Wyman—two eggs sunny side up with toast—the day before it closed.

“What made this place so special is the same [secret] sauce that makes Baltimore special,” he said. “I just felt extra-Baltimore there. Good people, all the time.”

“I wander around people’s attics, out in fields, in cellars…” —Andrew Wyeth 1917-2009

As the great Wyeth did with his easel in the Pennsylvania town of Chadds Ford, local landscape artist Lissa Abrams does in her hometown of Baltimore.

Abrams is one of those people—there’s at least one in every family—who drives through the old and often greatly changed neighborhoods where her ancestors once broke bread, helped a friend with a problem, raised kids, and told stories.

Sometimes it’s a sad stroll—the houses boarded up or gone completely—but other journeys bring a smile through the mist of years gone by.

“My parents used to drive around, too,” says Abrams, whose mother Rosalie Silber Abrams (1916-2009), grew up in a successful Baltimore bakery family and became the first female majority leader of the Maryland State Senate.

Abrams’ late father, William, grew up on a block of Linden Avenue (now torn down) near Druid Hill Park before the family moved to Dorchester Road in Forest Park. His parents belonged to the Bais Hamedrash Hagodol Congregation at Baltimore and Chester Streets in East Baltimore, a synagogue which is now also gone.

These memories were going through Abrams’ mind last year when she attended a funeral at Wayland Baptist church on Garrison Boulevard in Forest Park. Noticing the Stars of David on the building, she remembered it as the original Beth Tfiloh synagogue, which was built in 1927.

She decided that such places—of which there are many in Baltimore, where the Jewish community goes back to the early-and-mid-19th century—needed to be preserved in oil even if the brick and mortar had fallen.

And now, they are. Some 55 paintings of eight synagogues by about a dozen-and-a-half artists, both Jewish and Gentile, are now on view in an exhibit at the Hoffberger Gallery of the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation on Park Heights Avenue. A reception for the exhibit—in which synagogues both defunct and still in operation are depicted—will be held on Sunday, September 15th at Baltimore Hebrew, and the paintings will be on display through October 28.

“I like painting moments in time,” says Abrams, treasurer of the Mid-Atlantic Plein Air Painters Association, several members of which are in the exhibit. “I love painting things that are old, that might be gone in a couple of years.”

Abrams has learned that, in Baltimore—where history long precedes the founding of the nation—”now you see it, now you don’t” can happen to just about anything at any time.

“A lot of these are big, beautiful buildings that take a lot of maintenance,” she says. “I’m sure they’ll be around for a while, but eventually…you never know.”

“Oheb Shalom, Study of Form and Faith” —Stewart White

“Gone” Ahavas Achim—Lissa Abrams

The synagogues—or shuls—portrayed in the exhibit include B’nai Israel on Lloyd Street near Corned Beef Row, still vibrant in the one-time epicenter of Jewish Baltimore; Shaarei Tfiloh, also in operation, in Druid Hill Park (where the Jewish community migrated after first settling in East Baltimore); and the former Eutaw Place Temple of the Oheb Shalom congregation in Bolton Hill, designed by Joseph Evans Sperry, best known as the architect of the Bromo Seltzer Tower.

Another painting of note is a sad and beautiful corner building (boarded up and scarred) of pale orange brick—once home to Congregation Ahava Achim at 427 Pulaski Street—in southwest Baltimore, an area known during the Great Depression as “Little Jerusalem.”

“I’m honest [in depicting] all the work I do, but when you’re painting a religious building there’s an extra feeling of, ‘I better get this right,’” says Crystal Moll, perhaps Baltimore’s best known plein air artist who contributed a canvas of the old Eutaw Place Temple, modeled after the Great Synagogue of Florence, Italy and now a Masonic Lodge.

“I’ve always wanted to paint that building,” says Moll, who did a 16 inch-by-16 inch detail of the grand building’s domes and also has a painting of Shaarei Tfiloh in the show. Each visit to Eutaw Place, she said, took a few hours and she set up her easel there about six times before completing the work.

“You always have great conversations when you’re sitting on the sidewalk painting,” Moll says. “People come up and say that they’re an artist too, pull out their phone and show you pictures of their work.”

Which is all well and good. You can’t really haul around framed canvases all the time to share your art with friends and strangers. But long after digital images have been deleted or lost in some cyber crash, oil on canvas—like the faith represented in the “Baltimore’s Bygone Synagogues” show will endure.

“It’s about making sure all the colors work together,” says Abrams. “I’m not too mystical—with me, what you see is pretty much what you get. It’s all about capturing the light…”

Along with a couple of centuries of faith, migration, and history in the Queen City of the Patapsco River.

“He was one of the greatest of the true Colts . . . ”
—Pete Genovese, son of an Italian barber

Last week, when the first reports of Gino Marchetti’s death hit the news, somebody on TV flubbed the Hall of Fame football legend’s last name. Instead of pronouncing the second syllable with a hard C—as in “kettle”—he made a soft C, like “cheddar.”

Obviously, the guy behind the microphone did not grow up in Baltimore.

“Gino Mar-cheh-tee died,” was how it came over Phyllis DeFelice Rubino’s television in Belair. As soon as the words were out of the announcer’s mouth, the die-hard Colts fan called the station to complain.

Rubino, who came of age in 1950s Highlandtown when the area was Baltimore’s second Little Italy, wasn’t the only Colts fan to call TV Hill with a correction after Marchetti succumbed to pneumonia on April 29 in Paoli, Pennsylvania. He was 93.

But it’s a good bet that the she was the only one who jumped up and down on the Memorial Stadium sidelines and screamed Marchetti’s name —along with Unitas and Donovan, Ameche and Parker—in white boots and a short blue jumper way back when she was an original Colts cheerleader.

“He was like a freight train,” said Rubino of the 6-foot-4, 245-pound defensive end, a Colt from 1953 through 1966. Freight train, yes—his surviving peers were quoted in nationwide obituaries saying you did not want to get in Gino’s way. But he was also quick off the snap, agile, and as fast as just about anyone in the backfield, be it running back or quarterback, whom it was his job to bring down. “We went crazy when he made a tackle,” said Rubino, who cheered for the team for more than a decade.

The West Virginia-born Marchetti was the son of an immigrant coal miner. He was the husband to Joan Plecenik; father to Gina Burgess, Michelle Kapp, John Marchetti, and Eric Marchetti; stepfather to Donna Lloyd; and beloved grandfather and great-grandfather many times over.

But to Nazzareno F. Vellegia—the 86-year-old son of one of Little Italy’s original restaurateurs—Marchetti was a dear friend and, not long after the Colts were humiliated by the New York Jets in the 1969 Super Bowl, the best man at his wedding.

He was a big fan of the polenta parties hosted by Enrico Vellegia, founder of the restaurant at 829 East Pratt Street, which began serving meals out of the family’s private kitchen on High Street in 1937 and was sold in 2009. It is now a failed and shuttered sports bar.

“Gino’s favorite dish was veal saltimbocca,” said “Naz” Vellegia of the veal, prosciutto, and sage dish marinated in dry white wine. The name translates into “jumps in the mouth,” for how good it is and plenty made the journey from plate to palate when Marchetti dined at Vellegia’s.

Naz said his extended family got to know Marchetti and some of his teammates—particularly fellow Italians Alan Ameche and Joe Campanella—when the local Italian-American Civic Club invited them to a father and son dinner. “He was very proud to be Italian. We all were,” said Naz.

The trio of Italian ballplayers would later launch a fast-food restaurant called Gino’s in Dundalk, which became a chain whose “Gino Giant,” is said to have been copied by McDonald’s for the Big Mac. The burger joint’s jingle is still fondly remembered: “Everybody goes to Gino’s, cuz Gino’s is the place to go . . .”

“Marchetti was one of the greatest defensive players I ever watched,” said Pete Genovese, who grew up above his father’s barbershop at 234 South Highland Avenue before moving to St. Louis to teach college literature. “No smart coach or quarterback ever ran a play to his side.”

Genovese’s father Pietro was not an especially keen fan of sports, but he knew enough to know which teams had an Italian on the roster and would root for that paisan no matter for whom he played. “He’s the one who told me that [Red Sox outfielder] Tony Conigliaro’s name meant ‘rabbit,’” he said. “It was all a matter of pride.”

When it came to other ethnicities, however, the old barber had a decidedly closed mind. Pete never told his father that Hall of Fame catcher Roy Campanella of the Brooklyn Dodgers [and the Baltimore Elite Giants of the Negro Leagues] was African-American.

Marchetti, however, was vocal in his support of his black teammates, both in college and in the pros. “He stood up for his black college teammates [at the University of San Francisco] before a bowl game that tried to exclude blacks,” said Jack Gilden, author of Collision of Wills, a 2018 book about the testy relationship between Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas and coach Don Shula. “Gino urged the team to turn down the invitation and they did.”

Deeply held, Marchetti brought his convictions to Baltimore—where in 1969 he was named the best defensive end in the first half-century of NFL history—and the Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio in 1972.

Upon learning of his old friend, teammate, and fellow Hall of Famer’s death, Colts running back Lenny Moore told the The Baltimore Sun: “With all of the racism and stuff going on then, Gino was right there in our corner, and we never forgot that.”

Marchetti’s death, said Moore, “ . . . hits the heart.”

Right between the blue horseshoes on a white helmet.

“My name means the shape I am…” —Humpty Dumpty

Martine Richards was in bad shape, afraid she was going to wind up with egg on her face.

Her party for friends and acquaintances—an afternoon of silliness and vittles, “the dumbest thing I do all year,” she said—had always been a manageable affair, held at her home or a friend’s house and once in Druid Hill Park.

But this year, as the 31-year-old geared up for the Seventh Annual Baltimore Deviled Egg Pageant, and for reasons unknown, the event took on a life of its own, becoming bigger and more intimidating by the day.

Richards woke up a few weeks ago to find that she had a monster on her hands. And it is set to invade the Single Carrot Theatre at 1 p.m. this Sunday, September 16.

It seems that more than 1,200 people expressed interest in attending Martine’s little egg party via Facebook, well over ten times than had ever attended before. The response presented two problems: The Single Carrot lobby near Richards’ home in Remington has a capacity of about 100. And even if she could accommodate such a ravenous crowd, could there possibly be enough eggs prepared in time for everyone to down a few?

In the Gospels, the loaves and fishes are not accompanied by a side of deviled eggs.

By the math of most informal events, where a fraction of those who say they cannot wait to attend actually show up, Richard reckons that everything will be fine—especially if the weather is nice so the theater parking lot can accommodate the overflow.

Hopefuls will battle it out in the following categories: “Best Meaty Egg,” “Best Meatless Egg,” “Best Not an Egg,” (let your minds wander), and “Audience Choice.”

After a quintet of judges has selected a winner in each of those groups, the most delectable diablo will be crowned “Best in Show,” with a tiara and wild applause along with a whole bunch of honorable mentions just for fun.

This leaves a parsley-garnished question on the tip of every great-aunt’s tongue: What about the best traditional deviled egg?

“There used to be a traditional category, but it caused too many arguments,” said Richards. “Everybody thought their grandmother’s recipe was the classic. I got too much push back and did away with it.”

Deviled egg aficionado Kendall Jenkins, another Remington resident who runs with Richards’ grub posse, believes the quandary over what is a “true deviled egg” falls into two historic classes: savory versus sweet. Even with a divide as simple as that, however, provincial predilections abide.

“You will find people are incredibly loyal to a brand of mayonnaise that they use,” said Jenkins, a 30-year-old originally from North Carolina. “I would only dare to use homemade mayo or Duke’s in my eggs.”

Duke’s is decidedly a Southern product, though it appears in groceries as far away as Idaho and Maine. Baltimoreans favor Hellman’s mayonnaise (“bring out the best!”) while a younger generation of Crabtown cooks prefer a shake of Old Bay on top instead of the paprika that likely dusted the deviled eggs at their First Communion or Bar Mitzvah.

No matter the filling or the garnish, said Jenkins, “appearance is important for the perfect deviled egg. You want the eggs to look neat and clean, and it is crucial to not overcook the yolks so you have a nice bright yellow color to your filling.”

In many families, where at least one matron or matriarch-in-waiting holds the title of “deviled egg lady,” the debate over what makes for the real thing is as intense as the arguments among Italian-Americans over whose grandmother made the best tomato sauce.

The deviled egg recipe in the family of 2018 pageant judge Courtney Hobson goes back to the first decades of the 20th century, back to the southern Virginia kitchen of her maternal great-grandmother, Brownie Cornelia Morgan Gaines in the Shenandoah Valley town of Staunton.

“My mother learned from her mom and she learned from Brownie. I have eaten deviled eggs for as long as I can remember,” said Hobson, who at 28, long before the mantle is typically passed to the next generation, has become “the deviled egg lady” in her family.

Certainly, there are families in which the hallowed (and hollowed) honor of filling a cut-in-half-and-scooped-out hard-boiled egg with a whipped yolk concoction belongs to a man. But that seems to be as untraditional as a deviled egg made with chicken liver mousse and pureed pear, an entry in a previous Richards contest.

The Hobson family recipe follows tradition, one that Courtney sampled as a young “official taster” before the goodies were set out with the potato salad, sliced ham, and dinner rolls at family gatherings.

“It has to have a good balance of vinegar and mustard,” said Hobson, who uses wet mustard where Brownie was partial to dry. As a kid, she said, “I knew [the filling] was just right when it wasn’t too vinegary—the mustard helped to calm it down but the relish still gave it some kick.”

While Courtney will be making Hobson family deviled eggs for “the judges circle,” as will her fellow jurists, everyone outside of that circle be forewarned.

“I typically don’t trust most people’s deviled eggs,” she said.