Review: Oleum’s Vegan Fare Wows in Fells Point

A quick look at Oleum’s menu and you might not realize you’re at a vegan restaurant: There are no Impossible burgers or seitan bowls or sandwiches with wacky trademarked names.

Instead, there’s an extensive list of creative, compelling, admirably constructed dishes highlighting spices and international flavors, like charred red-pepper risotto with Aleppo eggplant and smoked paprika; ricotta ravioli sauced with romesco; and pizzas topped with harissa-marinated mushrooms, lacinato kale, tahini and hummus, and roasted artichokes.

A closer read, however, makes clear that everything here—including a variety of cheeses, sausages, and salumi—is made entirely with plants.

Oleum is currently one of the few dedicated vegan restaurants in Baltimore, certainly of this caliber and ambition, especially since troubled celebrity chef Matthew Kenney shuttered Liora two years ago. Open since June in the building that previously housed Bondhouse Kitchen, Oleum had both a circuitous and accelerated journey to its Fells Point corner rowhouse.

Seven years ago, Oleum’s chef-owner, Alisha Adibe, was a personal trainer who wasn’t vegan, didn’t really cook, and, unless you count a long-ago stint at an Applebee’s in her hometown of Leavenworth, Kansas, hadn’t worked in a restaurant kitchen. When her doctor suggested that she go vegan to address some health issues, her first thought was, “That’s crazy.” Her second thought was, “I’m going to show him.”

So she not only became vegan, but started cooking all her own food from scratch. This was not just because she’s admittedly competitive, but because at the time she and her husband, Gabriel, were stationed in San Diego. Soon she was cooking not only for herself and her husband, but for his co-workers and her clients. Over the next few years, the couple moved to Arizona, back to San Diego, and then to Okinawa, Japan, where, again, she found a demand for her cooking, especially when the pandemic hit. Soon she had seven employees in her home kitchen, all of whom were military spouses.

“That all happened really fast, and I enjoyed it,” she says one morning, sitting at the long bar in Oleum’s cozy dining room. “But I did not enjoy the dishes, because we still didn’t have a commercial dishwasher. My staff would leave and I’d just stay there and wash dishes for hours.”

When her husband was transferred to Maryland, where he has family, Adibe decided to find a bigger space—and a dishwasher. “I was like, well, let’s see what I need to do to open a restaurant, to see if people want my food outside of a little island.”

First, in the spring of 2024, she opened a ghost kitchen in Little Italy, then, when demand grew, a full-fledged restaurant in Harborplace. Less than a year later, as demand continued to increase, she moved to Fells Point. (Adibe picked the restaurant’s name after doing a Google-translate search for “olive oil”; oleum is Latin for oil.)

Early on a weekday evening, only six weeks after she opened, the 64-seat place is packed, the clientele is diverse—young and old, vegan and not—the servers are deftly managing the crowd, and Adibe is roaming the floor, chatting with diners. Many tables have pizzas, made with flour sourced from Italy, which arrive on round metal trays, beautifully appointed with a variety of vegan cheeses, including a special blend made in-house, as well as an array of colorful vegetables, spices, fresh herbs, and plant based meats.

The Gabriel, named for Adibe’s husband, has a rich pesto sauce under generous layers of cheeses, vegan Italian sausage, red onions, and Calabrian chiles. A dish of imported Italian bucatini comes threaded around sauteed mushrooms in a marvelously creamy sauce of white wine, thyme, soy cream, Parmesan, and white miso—a nod to Adibe’s time in Japan. One of the seasonal salads, the Salatat Marakech is a towering marvel—both gorgeous and deeply flavorful—built from greens, avocado, fennel, watermelon radish, snap peas, and mint, all doused in a preserved-lemon vinaigrette and sprinkled with pistachios.

Happily—and fittingly for a restaurant that caters to a clientele wishing to avoid ingredients some consider unhealthful—the cocktail menu has as many drinks made alcohol-free as with booze, and they’re as pretty and enticing as the food.

And then there are the desserts: a towering slice of carrot cake, tiramisu made with tofu mascarpone, sticky toffee pudding, chocolate-chip cookies. Made to-order (chocolate chunks, coconut yogurt) and thus arriving warm and gooey from the oven, they’re a perfect end to a generous meal.

“When I went vegan,” says Adibe, “I was like, ‘I have to learn how to make chocolate chip cookies, because I’m going to miss them.’”

She didn’t have to go without and, thankfully, neither do we.

OLEUM: 701 S. Bond St., 410-231-3102. HOURS: Tues.-Thurs. 11 a.m.-3 p.m., 4-10 p.m.; Fri.-Sat. 1 a.m.-3 p.m., 4-11 p.m.; Sun. 1 a.m.-3 p.m., 4-9 p.m. PRICES: Appetizers: $8-30; pizzas, $16-28; mains: $14-32; desserts, $7-23. AMBIANCE: Sophisticated rowhome.